I am proud of all our family members and am posting an unsolicited thank you from one of Abby's clients. They are all productive, good citizens.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Short history of Joe's lies:
https://townhall.com/columnist
+++
Additional random personal thoughts:
Benedict Arnold was America's first prominent Revolutionary traitor but he was not president.
Joe Biden is probably America's first American traitor and president.
There is no doubt he lied about his relationship to Hunter's corrupt business undertakings and because of the various money flows from China and Russia there is strong evidence President Biden is compromised and beholden to China, in particular.
Otherwise, why would he allow illegals from China to crash our border, and look the other way as Chinese spy satellites fly over our entire nation, Chinese troops flood into Cuba, seek to steal our most important military and industrial secrets, purchase tracts of land adjacent to military bases, set up police departments in areas of concentrated American Chinese citizens?
Why does he ignore Chinese students who steal our technology while working in our university labs and departments, establish consulates engaged in espionage? Why has Biden not called upon Putin to cease fire? Most important of all, why has Biden not responded to Iranian surrogate's attacks on our troops and our Embassy?
The list of traitorous activities seems endless?
Now that Hunter has been indicted the timing allows him to refuse to testify before Congress which benefits his father with respect to Congress obtaining documents verifying allegations of money laundering, failure to pay taxes etc.
Furthermore, should Biden remain president he continues in a position of being able to pardon his son before possibly resigning so Newsom can replace him.
|
Finally, yesterday (Dec. 7) marked the day FDR said was one of infamy. Perhaps China is planning such an attack from Cuba.
Conspiratorial. perhaps? However, there is a preponderance of evidence unless you have concrete between your ears and pretend blindness as does most everyone in the mass media.
We know Democrats will do anything to remain in power and, if you read Mark Levin's recent book, it is hard to deny many hate America.
+++
So what as long as top universities continue to be seeded by Arab/radical Islamist countries and oil entities.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/
+++
The moral collapse of the West
Refusing to distinguish between Hamas aggressors and their Israeli victims, liberals scream for a ceasefire. No one is calling for Hamas to surrender, which would stop all the killing immediately. Op-ed.
By 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, in 2018. (To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com)
(JNAS) Students from American universities provided impassioned testimony this week to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce about the antisemitism crisis on campus. The problem isn’t just people picking on Jews; worse, it’s being fueled by others who should know better but who are facilitating it.
They claimed that university administrators and faculty were either turning a blind eye to the intimidation of Jewish students or actively participating in it.
Congress heard about physical assaults on Jewish students, calls on campus to “gas the Jews” and taunts that “Hitler was right.”
Eyal Yakoby, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke about how he and other students had been forced to take refuge in their rooms as classmates and professors chanted for the genocide of the Jews. They had spoken of “the glorious October 7” and said things like “You’re a dirty little Jew, you deserve to die.”
MIT student Talia Khan, the daughter of a Jewish mother and an Afghan Muslim father, said that 70% of Jewish students on campus felt forced to hide signs of their Jewish identity.
After one post-doctoral student asserted that Jewish people wanted to enslave the world through a global apartheid system, falsely claimed that Israel harvested Palestinian organs and implied that the average Israel was a Nazi, his department’s diversity officer stated, said Khan, that none of this was “hate speech” and that the organ harvesting theory was “confirmed.”
Other diversity staff at MIT had claimed that Israel had no right to exist, while faculty members told Jewish students that if they were scared they should just “go back to Israel.” The presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT—Claudine Gay, Liz Magill and Sally Kornblut—also appeared before the committee. Their responses caused jaws to drop.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) asked them whether the genocidal chants heard on campus, such as “Long live the intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” violated these universities’ own policies against bullying or harassment.
To Stefanik’s mounting incredulity and disgust, the three refused to give a straight answer and said it all depended on the “context.” What conceivable context can there be to find acceptable any calls for the genocide of the Jews?
When Rep. John James (R-Mich.) asked the three presidents what they were doing to fight anti-Jewish hatred, he was met by silence as they looked at each other to check that they were all in line—in doing nothing.
The behavior of these three Ivy League school heads was shocking in the extreme. But how can anyone really be astonished, given what’s been happening to education over the past several decades?
In many cases, educationists and administrators are failing to act against antisemitism not just out of cowardice but because they themselves subscribe to all or parts of the warped and morally bankrupt mindset at the core of this. They have allowed identity politics, “intersectionality” and victim culture to infest campuses across the West, refusing to take condign action against bullying and harassment in the fields of ethnicity, sexuality and gender.
These dogmas involve a wholesale breakdown in norms of morality and rationality. They hold that certain categories of people—such as men, heterosexuals and Israelis—can’t be victims because they are deemed to hold political and economic power over women, gays and Palestinians who therefore aren’t responsible for any wrongs they may do.
More perniciously still, identity politics, rooted in the Marxist doctrine that the world is divided between the powerful and the oppressed, views Jews as possessing supreme power over the entire Western world through a capitalist system they supposedly deploy in their own interests and to the disadvantage of others.
Campus administrators such as the three presidents may believe they are upholding neutrality and free speech. They are actually guilty of double standards since they don’t uphold for Jews the protection they give to groups that “intersectional” dogma presents as “oppressed.”
All this also helps explain the astonishing silence by women’s groups and other liberals over the extreme sexual assaults that Hamas perpetrated on women whom they attacked and took hostage on Oct. 7. Evidence has now surfaced of the horrific barbarism and sadism with which these women were assaulted. They were subjected not only to multiple rapes with extreme violence but also to the mutilation of their sexual organs.
Yet although there was undeniable evidence of widespread rape during the pogrom right from the start, it took the United Nations eight weeks to say anything about this carnage, finally saying feebly this week that it was “alarmed” by accounts of “gender-based atrocities and sexual violence” during the Hamas attacks. Meanwhile, women’s rights organizations and human rights NGOs have still said next to nothing about this hideous depravity.
The shocking reason for this reticence is that the barbaric onslaught upon Israeli women undermines the narratives with which such liberals identify.
The slogan of the performative “#MeToo” movement, which in demonizing all men as potential rapists undermined proper horror and revulsion at unambiguous rape, is “Silence is violence.” The Hamas pogrom, which has so sickeningly demonstrated what real violence against women looks like, has shown up “#MeToo” as insultingly vacuous.
It also conflicts with the liberal narrative that demonizes Israelis as “oppressors” and sanitizes Palestinians as their victims. The unthinkable suffering of the Israeli women (and we now learn that men were sexually assaulted, too) at the hands of Hamas just doesn’t fit.
At the core of this perverse reaction to the Hamas atrocities lies the fundamental progressive mantra of moral relativism, the abolition of objective truth and the dismissal of the need to distinguish between types of behavior. But without such distinctions, morality doesn’t exist.
Liberals thus ignore the distinction between the deliberate slaughter of civilians and the unintentional killing of civilians in a justified war. They ignore the fact that Hamas tries to maximize the number of Israelis they kill (as well as deliberately using Palestinians as cannon fodder), while Israel goes to lengths unknown in any other country’s military to spare civilian lives as far as possible.
Liberals ignore the fact that among the Palestinians being killed are thousands of Hamas terrorists, and conversely present Israel falsely and venomously as deliberate child-killers. They call the Palestinian attempt at the genocide of the Jews “resistance” and Israel’s resistance to being annihilated “genocide.”
Refusing to distinguish between the Hamas aggressors and their Israeli victims, they scream for a ceasefire by Israel. None of them is calling for Hamas to surrender, which would stop all the killing immediately. A ceasefire by Israel, by contrast, would sentence yet more Israeli civilians to be murdered, tortured and raped.
Those who want Israel to “stop the killing” therefore aren’t gentle pacifists devoted to the ideal of the brotherhood of mankind. They are moral cretins. Alas, there are now a very large number of them in the West.
Now we can see why the genocidal incitement on campus is studiously ignored by university administrators; why those screaming to “globalize the intifada” are demonstrating alongside liberals who say they merely want the killing to stop; and why feminists have been silent about the barbaric rape, murder and sexual mutilation of Israeli women by the Palestinians of Gaza.
Liberal dogma has produced a society of moral depravity that is marching shoulder to shoulder with the savages of Islamic holy war.
The Hamas pogrom and the war in Gaza are acting as a kind of barium meal in the body of the West, illuminating from the inside a profound sickness in this poisoned civilization that may prove terminal.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
The first of many?
+++
+++
Wharton board calls on Penn president Liz Magill to resign
By Dan Primack, author of Axios Pro Rata
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill is being asked to resign by the board of Penn's Wharton business school, according to a letter obtained by Axios.
Why it matters: Pressure is mounting on Magill and several other Ivy League leaders, following their widely-panned testimony earlier this week during a congressional hearing on antisemitism.
Earlier today, Axios reported that a wealthy donor pulled a $100 million gift to the school, citing Magill's appearance in D.C. as a key reason.
What they're saying: Wharton's board of advisors wrote in a letter to Magill that it has held "an unprecedented" eight meetings since its regularly scheduled Nov. 16 meeting, mostly focused on student safety and other community issues related to antisemitism and "hate-based behavior" on Penn's campus.
"[The Board] has been, and remains, deeply concerned about the dangerous and toxic culture on our campus that has been led by a select group of students and faculty and has been permitted by University leadership ...
As a result of the University leadership's stated beliefs and collective failure to act, our board respectfully suggests to you and the Board of Trustees that the University requires new leadership with immediate effect."
News of the letter was first reported by Penn's student newspaper.
Behind the scenes: A source familiar with the situation said that neither Magill nor Board of Trustees Chair Scott Bok attended the Nov. 16 meeting, as they traditionally have done.
That meeting, which originally was expected to focus on artificial intelligence, instead was dominated by a Dean's discussion of the damage the university's response to the Israel-Hamas war is doing to Wharton.
The meeting concluded with a series of unanimous resolutions that were included in the letter to Magill.
Those resolutions primarily focused on changing Penn's code of conduct to, among other things, state that neither students, faculty, nor staff are to "celebrate or advocate for the murder, killing, genocide, or annihilation of any individual classmate or any group of individuals in our community."
Magill met around one week ago with Wharton's board, but declined to make the requested changes. The board's decision to request her resignation came following her congressional testimony.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DEI Must DIE and 100's of neo-Marxist professors must bite the dust with university presidents if American culture is to be revived and not die.
+++
DEI Drives Campus Antisemitism
Gerrymandering Jews into an ‘oppressed’ class won’t save universities from a malevolent ideology.
By
Heather MacDonald
Tuesday’s House hearing on campus antisemitism ratcheted up the pressure on American universities: counter the anti-Israel vitriol that exploded in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack or risk losing philanthropic and government support. The leading approach is sure to fail: doubling down on the ideologies and practices that led to the pro-Hamas fever in the first place.
Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager leading a Harvard donor revolt, told CNBC on Nov. 6 that he hadn’t previously read Harvard’s DEI statement. Though he had assumed DEI was “for all marginalized groups,” once he read the statement, he realized that “the DEI program at Harvard is limited to specific groups and exploits others.” Instead, Mr. Ackman suggested, DEI should cover all minorities, including Jews and Asians.
Jon Huntsman Jr. halted his contributions to the University of Pennsylvania on Oct. 15 to protest its leaders’ silence in the face of “hate,” which higher ed was “built to obviate.” An open letter to Penn President Liz Magill initiated by alumnus Marc Rowan called for mandatory antisemitism awareness training across the university. The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has demanded that Penn add modules on antisemitism to the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion trainings.
College leaders are happy to oblige. As Ms. Magill told lawmakers Tuesday, Penn has created an Action Plan to Combat Antisemitism and a University Task Force on Antisemitism. Since antisemitism is “interconnected” to “other forms of hate,” Ms. Magill explained in a Nov. 1 message, Penn is also rolling out a presidential commission on Islamophobia. The university must do better to “reject hate in all its forms,” she said on Nov. 1.
Northwestern University President Michael Schill is establishing a committee to prevent antisemitism and “other forms of hate.” The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is creating a Standing Together Against Hate council. The University of Maryland, a self-described “proud multicultural community,” launched a task force to eliminate “antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate.” DEI bureaucrats are well-represented on all these commissions and task forces.
But a university has no capacity to eliminate “hate,” nor should that be its mission. In the name of rejecting hate, colleges built their DEI bureaucracies in the first place and allowed bureaucrats and their faculty sympathizers to put certain facts and ideas off-limits. In the name of rejecting hate, colleges started requiring faculty—even in the hard sciences—to justify their research in the name of “inclusion” and “belonging.” Protected identity categories have constantly expanded while the haters shrank to an ever smaller subset of white males.
The real issue on campuses isn’t antisemitism but the anti-Western ethos that has colonized large swaths of the curriculum. Elite schools once disdained Jews because they were seen as outsiders to Western civilization. Now they are reviled as that civilization’s very embodiment. Students explain that their hatreds come from what they learn in class—that the West is built on white supremacism and oppression. Israel is cast as the Western settler-colonialist oppressor par excellence.
The Columbia University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine explained that “our classes regularly discuss the inevitability of resistance as part of the struggle for decolonization. We study under renowned scholars who denounce the fact that the media requires oppressed peoples to be ‘perfect victims’ ”—that is, not to commit acts of terrorism—“in order to deserve sympathy.” During a sit-in, a law student at Penn announced: “It was here where I read texts about the history of colonial regimes and the importance of decolonization. . . . I just want the university to try to do part of what it tries to teach us in the classrooms.”
A Harvard student posted on social media: “how have i read frantz fanon in no less than four classes here (writing on the violent algerian decolonial movement!!!) and yet you all side with the colonizer?” Another Harvard student: “what is WRONG with EVERYONE! This is literally a decolonization struggle before our eyes. like all of those places we learn about and have historicized and sympathize with now—algeria, south africa, haiti, more.”
Gerrymandering Jews into an “oppressed” class for DEI purposes wouldn’t do anything to prevent this classroom propaganda—which college leaders are at pains not to address. Since Oct. 7, presidents and faculty have routinely spoken of the “interconnectedness” of antisemitism and Islamophobia. A Nov. 16 lecture at Cornell University by Ross Brann, a professor of Judeo-Islamic studies, was titled “The Intersectionality of Antisemitism, Islamophobia and Racism.”
Who is found at that intersection? White supremacists, former Trump administration officials, evangelical Christians and white opponents of mass immigration from Muslim countries, to judge by Mr. Brann’s PowerPoint slides. None of these supposed oppressors play a significant role in pro-Hamas campus protests. The actual protesters—Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists, Queers for Palestine, socialist groups and proponents of the anti-Israel boycott, divest and sanctions movement—went unmentioned in the lecture. (Mr. Brann did briefly mention Louis Farrakhan as an antisemite.)
Mr. Ackman seems to be learning. In a Dec. 3 letter to Harvard President Claudine Gay, he described his conversations with faculty, who were willing to speak only confidentially. “The problems at Harvard are clearly not just about Jews and Israel,” Mr. Ackman wrote. Harvard also discriminates against Asians and “straight white males.” Harvard’s diversity office “is an important culprit in this discrimination on campus as it sees the world in a framework of oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressor class includes white males, Asians, Jews and other people perceived to be successful and powerful.”
Solving the problems of higher ed requires rejecting this victim ideology wholesale. “Universities need to abandon the concept that they have a central role in moral education,” Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president, told me. Donors and alumni should demand changes in governance and curricula to counterbalance the anti-Western ideology that undergirds the anti-Israel coalition. Every identity-based bureaucratic sinecure should be eliminated. Trustees and presidents should be chosen based on their determination to support humanistic learning and academic excellence, not “inclusion.”
Efforts to impose such changes will be fought tooth and nail. On their success hangs a civilization.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “When Race Trumps Merit.”
And:
CAIR rotten to it's core.
+++
The True Face of the Anti-Israel Movement
The leader of the Council on American-Islamic Relations celebrated Oct. 7, in his own words.
The Editorial Board
The response in anti-Israel circles to Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre has been clarifying. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the tip of the spear on U.S. campuses, early on called the slaughter “a historic win for Palestinian resistance.”
The tune hasn’t changed, even from the leaders pressuring President Biden. Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), celebrated Oct. 7 at an American Muslims for Palestine convention on Nov. 24. A damning excerpt was publicized Thursday by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
American Muslims for Palestine then took down the full video, and Mr. Awad now claims a “hate website selected remarks from my speech out of context and spliced them together to create a completely false meaning.” But we got the video before Mr. Awad’s ally hid it, and here’s what CAIR’s leader had to say:
“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on Oct. 7. And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, that they were not allowed to walk in. And yes, the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves. And yes, Israel, as an occupying power, does not have that right to self-defense.”
The crowd applauded, and not a word in Mr. Awad’s speech qualified his pleasure with Oct. 7, justified as “self-defense.”
Democrats and media have long treated CAIR as a primary political spokesman for Muslim Americans. In late October the White House invited Mr. Awad to convey Muslim concerns about the war to the President. In May the Biden Administration included CAIR as a partner in its Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. The White House has now removed CAIR from that document and condemned Mr. Awad’s remarks.
On stage Mr. Awad accused Israel of buying “corrupt members of Congress,” concluding, “We have to free so many people from the shackles of AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and its affiliates who have sold the soul of America.” Complaining of Mr. Biden’s betrayal, Mr. Awad asked, “For how much? It is for how much AIPAC and its affiliates have been controlling the U.S. government and the U.S. Congress. . . . Unless we free Congress, we will not be able to free Palestine.”
There it is, the hoary conspiracy that justice—however defined—could be achieved if only the Jews weren’t secretly shackling and manipulating the powers that be. Maybe that’s easier for Mr. Awad to accept than the truth: The American people support Israel and oppose Palestinian terrorism.
But CAIR and its allies have influence, and Mr. Awad said the White House had begun to listen. “When we say ‘if there is no cease-fire, there will be no votes for you in 2024 elections,’” he said, “we started to see the tone changing—and the position changing.”
Mr. Awad’s co-panelist was Osama Abuirshaid, director of American Muslims for Palestine, the leading sponsor of SJP on campus and an organizer of anti-Israel protests across the country. Mr. Abuirshaid told a rally Dec. 1: “What they alleged that happened on Oct. 7 turned out to be a lie. Most of the [Israeli] civilians were killed by their own army.” Will Democrats bend on Israel to people like this?
Near the end of Mr. Awad’s speech, he said, “I ask young people: Be wise. You are not in Palestine. You are not in Gaza. The language there doesn’t work here.” You know, less on the Jews and violence, and more on human rights. He should have taken his own advice.
++++++++++++++++++++
There is always a price to pay.
Congress cannot solve a problem, even if it can, until it surfaces. This is why I have been glad to see anti-Semitism surface from the sewer. Now let's see how far Congress takes the solution and whether the righteous from both sides of the aisle can work together to bring about it's elimination until the next time.
+++
The Political Price of Anti-Israel Protests
Democrats start to push back against public antisemitism. It may be too late.
By
Daniel Henninger
It has come to this. The president of the United States and the governor of Pennsylvania issued statements this week denouncing a protest outside a falafel restaurant in Philadelphia. Needless to say, the protesters were pro-Palestinian and the owner of the restaurant, Goldie, is Israel-born. The protesters’ chant was also predictable: “Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.”
Set aside the fantastic moral conceit of “we”—this Philly mob—accusing a restaurant owner of genocide. Set aside the resonance of Kristallnacht in 1938, which Gov. Josh Shapiro noted. What’s clear is that the Democratic left’s anti-Israel (which is to say, anti-Jewish) outpourings have become reflexive—and a growing domestic political problem for the party.
Consider what Rep. Pramila Jayapal put in motion Sunday. Responding to reports of Hamas’s raping and mutilating Israeli women as a planned strategy, Ms. Jayapal, who heads the more than 100-member House Progressive Caucus, told CNN’s Dana Bash: “I think it’s horrific and I think rape, sexual assault is horrific. I think that it happens in war situations. Terrorist organizations like Hamas obviously are using these as tools. However, I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians.”
Hillary Clinton, addressing a United Nations meeting the next day, said, “It is outrageous just that some who claim to stand for justice are closing their eyes and their hearts to the victims of Hamas.” On Tuesday, 95 House Democrats voted for a resolution that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” while 105 of them voted against or present.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the San Francisco Democrats.
“San Francisco Democrats” is the memorable phrase Jeane Kirkpatrick delivered—six times—in a speech at the 1984 GOP convention to tag the Democratic Party as out of touch with American values. Kirkpatrick’s speech alone wasn’t the reason Ronald Reagan carried 49 states against Walter Mondale, but the phrase stuck.
Noteworthy is that Kirkpatrick’s speech came more than 15 years after the Democratic Party had fallen into division over the Vietnam War. Book-length histories provide the details, but what matters for the current split over Israel is that Democrats divided in 1968 between traditional liberals and an antiwar left that specialized in nonstop protests.
In 1972’s presidential election, incumbent Richard Nixon wiped out progressive Sen. George McGovern, winning 49 states and 60.7% of the popular vote. Democrats today aren’t worrying about another Nixon or Reagan landslide. They’re lying awake remembering Lyndon B. Johnson’s resignation speech in March 1968, which put the party on a long downhill slide.
LBJ, who had presided over passage of the Great Society legislation, stunned the country by announcing he wouldn’t seek re-election. Back then during Vietnam, protesters yelled, “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Today, the left chants “Genocide Joe.”
This analogy is far from perfect. In fact, LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, barely lost to Nixon (who in the 1968 primaries had defeated then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan with Trump-like percentages).
READ MORE WONDER LAND
Hamas Seizes the AdvantageNovember 29, 2023
Gaza Is the First Humanitarian-Crisis WarNovember 15, 2023
Bidenomics Gets No RespectNovember 8, 2023
Today, the Democrats in part are running a stop-the-clock strategy to avoid another 1968. Back then in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary, Democratic challenger and war critic Sen. Eugene McCarthy got 42% of the vote. Two weeks later, with younger voters deserting LBJ, the president quit the race. This week, Florida’s Democratic Party effectively canceled its primary, evaporating the challenge from Rep. Dean Phillips or anyone else. The party of course already tried to demote New Hampshire’s lead primary role.
Joe Biden can run for president, but he can’t hide from the ghosts of ’68. U.S. Muslim leaders from several swing states—including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada—held an “Abandon Biden” rally Saturday. “Genocide Joe” protesters show up at Mr. Biden’s public appearances. Sen. Bernie Sanders, darling of young leftist voters in the 2020 presidential primaries, is the leading anti-Israel voice in the Senate.
One may argue that the Israel-Hamas war’s main fighting will be over by summer, and the tumult among attention-deficient Gen Z voters will dissipate, avoiding a replay of the riots at the Democrats’ 1968 Chicago convention. But the wounds inflicted on the party won’t heal quickly with the broader American electorate.
Antisemitism is the new antiwar—a litmus test of progressive solidarity. Antiwar was arguable. Antisemitism, no matter how often it is euphemized as pro-Palestine, isn’t. Jewish voters have some hard thinking to do about where their partisan interests lie now.
Whaddabout the too-odious Donald Trump as their probable opponent? Short answer: It’s not possible to overstate how much liberals despised Nixon and even Reagan. Relying on personal abhorrence alone to win is a bad bet.
The real political threat this wave of left-wing protesters presents to the Biden Democrats is that they are so unhinged, always at the edge of violence. We are living in disturbed times—crime, inflation, post-pandemic challenges, global disorder. It resembles the 1970s. Now comes the spectacle of unrelenting anti-Israel protests in American cities. Elected Democrats are starting to push back. But it may be too little, too late to save Joe Biden or any conceivable replacement.
+++++++++++++++++++++
Democrats’ Border Unreality
Republicans turn out to be serious about reforming asylum and parole rules.
By
Kimberley A. Strassel
Think of the Senate’s failed Wednesday vote on Ukraine and Israel funding as the early stages of Democratic grief—denial, anger, bargaining. It seems Republicans are serious about border security after all. Will depression give way to Democratic acceptance?
The unified Republican opposition to the vote sent a clear message to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his liberal troops, who’ve labored to ignore what’s been politically plain for months. In August, when the White House asked for a further $24 billion in Ukraine aid, it recognized the Republican price of more foreign aid would be greater national security at the southern border. That’s why Joe Biden’s August funding request paired Ukraine dollars with an additional $4 billion for border security.
The White House’s mistake was betting it could simply buy off the opposition. Senate Republicans had swallowed that lure in the past. More than 16 of them—including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—had rushed to help the Biden White House pass blowout bipartisan infrastructure and semiconductor bills. And so the administration stuck with its money-solves-all approach, in October upping its border offer to $6.4 billion in return for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan dollars.
But the crisis at the border made this approach untenable. Daily crossings are again surging toward unprecedented levels. Republicans worry about the growing risk of a terrorist incursion across the southern line. And they know they’ll get no credit for greenlighting cash that is essentially used to facilitate today’s open-border policies. For more than a month, the GOP has made clear that the only trade to be made is real policy change on asylum and parole rules in return for Ukraine dollars.
The White House’s problem—and by extension Mr. Schumer’s—is the Democratic left. Policies that slow the border flow would help Mr. Biden and vulnerable Senate Democrats up for re-election. The president is facing crises abroad and home, his poll numbers are dismal; signing a Ukraine and Israel aid bill would count as a real political win.
But progressive lawmakers and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus are furious, decrying any changes to the status quo as unacceptable. The left might be able to swallow a change to the asylum standard, but they are refusing to budge on the parole issue—since that is Mr. Biden’s tool to allow into the country sweeping categories of noncitizens who otherwise lack a legal basis for admission. Lawmakers on the left also want to keep the asylum and parole issues as bargaining chips for a future debate over paths to citizenship.
Joe Biden remains terrified of his party’s left, which is why instead of coming to an agreement with the GOP—something that could have happened weeks ago—the White House has been running every play in the book. It tried the anger approach—berating Republicans as unreasonable and arguing the border is unrelated to national security. It tried fear-mongering. Mr. Biden warned this week that failure to pass the package immediately will lead to a Russian incursion into NATO lands and U.S. boots on the ground. It tried the straw-man ruse, suggesting there was no time to negotiate comprehensive immigration reform—when nobody was thinking that big in the first place.
Mr. Schumer tried the bargaining tactic, offering to give the GOP “an amendment vote for a border package entirely of their choosing, no conditions.” That one had Republicans in stitches. They knew Mr. Schumer would set the level for amendment passage at 60 votes and hold back enough Democrats to ensure failure—even as he allowed vulnerable red-state Democrats like Montana’s Jon Tester to help himself by voting for a doomed border security package. Even Republicans aren’t that dumb.
Wednesday’s failed vote also made that point, and Democrats are already glumly beginning to confront facts. “Senators work to revive border talks after foreign aid face plant,” explained Politico, noting that Mr. Biden has now “cracked the door open to further Democratic concessions.” Republicans know they have real leverage and came out of the vote reiterating core demands of tougher asylum requirements and a reduction in mass releases of immigrants into the U.S.
The White House has everything to gain by taking the lead in crafting a deal and then persuading Senate Democrats to help produce a strong bipartisan vote that would put pressure on the House to follow suit. Mr. Biden might have had his foreign aid already if he had been willing to confront the left and make a deal that would help both the president and the country. Better late than never.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
| ||
|
No comments:
Post a Comment