Biden Should Resolve to Stay in His Basement
Pentagon decides killing seven kids for politics is no biggie
As we look back on Joe Biden’s first year as president and the campaign that preceded it, the verdict is clear: Biden, his administration, and the country are better off when he stays in his basement, as he did though much of his 2020 campaign. He should resolve to do that as much as possible in 2022.
No one at any point on the political spectrum thinks that Biden or America had a good year. But only recently did the utter and complete uselessness of Joe Biden come to light. The man who said that he would “shut down the virus” if elected held a meeting with governors and basically said it was up to them somehow to achieve what he promised to do himself. “Look, there is no federal solution. This gets solved on the state level,” said Joe Biden, who has presided over more pandemic deaths than any president in U.S. history.
Go to your basement Joe.
It is easy to indict our entire national security establishment for losing in Afghanistan, but the final, deep humiliation was pure Joe Biden. He was the one who ordered the abandonment of Bagram air base, which would have at least allowed an orderly departure from the country as the Taliban swept to power. Biden remarked, “They concluded—the military—that Bagram was not much value added, that it was much wiser to focus on Kabul. And so, I followed that recommendation.” This improbable statement lasted only until the generals testified that it was a lie—of course they did not counsel abandoning a fortress in favor of a vulnerable and chaotic urban airfield. The administration also lied about the Americans they left behind. Biden has invoked the Trumanesque line on the presidency that “the buck stops here.” Ever the senator, of course it does not.
Go to your basement Joe.
Even Hillary Clinton, no moderate, got Biden’s number when she counseled against indulging the party’s far left: “But at the end of the day it means nothing if we don’t have a Congress that will get things done, and we don’t have a White House that we can count on to be sane and sober and stable and productive.”
Go to your basement Joe.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bill McGurn captures one of the big problems for Biden, which is that he is perfectly suited for the Senate:
As president, when Mr. Biden dozes off, loses his place, mispronounces some foreign name, or drones on with long, boring stories, it provokes speculation about his mental capacity. In the Senate, all these things make you one of the boys… The good news for a senator is that even someone with questionable mental facilities can mostly get by so long as he (or she) can be wheeled out for a vote when needed. The president, by contrast, is constantly in the public eye. Yet instead of embracing the leadership the presidential pulpit affords, Mr. Biden appears content to leave the fate of his agenda to be worked out in the back rooms of Congress.
When Bill Clinton got a rude wakeup call in the 1994 midterm elections, losing the Senate and the House of Representatives, which had been Democrat-run since 1933 with the exception of two congresses, he changed the course of his administration and became moderate (until Monica forced him to rely on the liberal Dem base). There is no chance Biden will do that; he simply lacks the leadership, moderating instincts, and relative youth that Clinton possessed as a southern former governor and attorney general, all of which aided his pivot. Furthermore, Biden has said he has ceased paying attention to polls, which if true means he is unlikely to take steps to head off a Republican landslide in November.
Given these factors, Biden, his administration, the country, and both political sides of the aisle would be better off with the President back in his basement, whether proverbially at the White House or physically in his Delaware retreat (he can ride the train there!). At least then, serious economic and foreign policy disasters on the horizon could be worked out with a minimum of his disastrous touch. It’s not a perfect solution, but it served him on the campaign.
Trump Should Stay in His Basement Too
A new poll is out with bad news for Donald Trump. The poll indicates that 54% of Republicans support Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination. That sounds like good news until you consider that 82% of those Republican respondents have a favorable opinion of Trump. In other words, a large and growing number of Republicans like myself favor the way Trump transformed the Right and confronted our feckless ruling class, no matter how sloppily. But we see 2024 as an opportunity to nominate a disciplined fighter who brings the best of Trump and ditches the baggage and self-involvement (and who doesn’t stick us with bureaucrats like Tony Fauci). It will also be time for America to have its first Gen X president, who can begin cleaning up the mess produced by lefty Boomers beginning with Bubba Clinton.
The same poll showed limited support for notional Trump alternatives. This dynamic will change fast once the race becomes more of a reality in 2023. A candidate who can challenge Trump by finding the right balance of cheering his achievements and get-tough approach while criticizing his shortcomings without sounding like a Lizbian NeverTrumper will win fast support. On the flip side, were Trump to go hostile on an accomplished conservative like Ron DeSantis, one of relatively few figures on the Right seen fighting woke neo-Marxists, the lying media, and shutdownistas every day, then Trump’s own support will plummet—as will interest in his joke of a media company.
Russia Hysteria on the Right
On the morning of New Year’s Eve, I was a panelist on FBN’s “Mornings With Maria.” One of the guests to join the program was James Carafano from the Heritage Foundation, which you may know as a Washington-based grift on conservative donors and rental PR agency with tax-deductible status. As Carafano expounded the necessity of arming Ukraine in its spat with Russia, I simply asked him what compelling U.S. interests existed in Ukraine. Of course, these basic questions drive Beltway experts crazy, and he rapidly became hysterical.
Apparently if we don’t stand up to Russia over eastern Ukraine, then Moscow will eventually overrun Western Europe. That was actually his argument. Of course, Moscow would have to plow through Ukraine, Poland, Austria, and eastern Germany to get to Western Europe. Europe’s economy is about 12 times the size of Russia’s, it has three times the population, and access to the best military technology. But apparently Europe is still so fragile—just as it was when NATO was founded in 1949—that only the USA can prevent the calamity in which the squat dance is performed daily from Piccadilly to Paris to Wilhelmstrasse.
This analysis isn’t just sad because it is cartoonish, facile, and wrong. It represents part of the establishment Republican effort to unlearn the lessons Trump tried to teach the party, especially avoiding unnecessary foreign conflict. It is little surprise coming from Heritage, which vacuumed up $123 million in revenue in 2019 to lard its bloated net asset base of $321 million. Unfortunately it is echoed by a surprising number of voices on the Right who are unable to differentiate Vladimir Putin from Stalin or Hitler.
One person who was able to appreciate that difference was the late Angelo Codevilla, a great American whom we lost in 2021. In summing up contemporary Russia, he wrote:
By the 2030s if not sooner, the Russian government will have filled such space and established such influence as comport with its own people’s and its neighbors’ realities, and will be occupied keeping it. Its conquest of Ukraine east of the Don signifies much less the acquisition of a base for further conquest than the achievement of modern Russia’s natural territorial limit in Europe.
Theorizing what John Quincy Adams would make of today’s situation, Angelo wrote:
Adams would recognize that today’s Russian rulers are not gentler or nicer than the emperor who shook off the Mongol yoke—who was not known as ‘Ivan the nice guy.’
He added:
Today, [Adams] would be confident that Russia realizes it cannot control Ukraine except for its Russian part, or the Baltics, never mind the states of Eastern Europe. He would reassure Russia that the United States will not interfere with Russia joining the mainstream of European affairs and will not use normal relations with Ukraine or any of Russia’s neighbors to inconvenience Russia. Adams would not engage in any hostilities to try defining Russia’s limits in Europe, knowing full well that this is beyond America’s capacity and that it undercuts the basis for fruitful relations.
It is a shame that people like Codevilla weren’t in the Trump administration to help the President with the policy dirty work and structure necessary to realize Trump’s gut instinct that Russia was a risk but not a mortal enemy. We’ll have to wait for the many histories of the Trump administration to be written possibly to understand whether and why seemingly none of his lieutenants aided the President in this crucial task, and instead let a dangerous world become potentially much more dangerous for the USA as we push Russia toward China.
On the show, Carafano cited favorably the instance when the U.S. military “killed 100 Russians” in Syria, which, by the telling, put Putin in his place and trimmed Moscow’s ambitions in that lamentable pile of blood-soaked rubble that was once a country. Lost on him and so many keyboard warriors is the scope of carnage that would ensue from a war between the USA and Russia, even a pointless one.
The establishment Republican instinct to liken today’s Russia to the Soviet Union or Third Reich fits alongside the equally wrong Democrat need to hype the Russia threat, driven by true believers who still cannot accept that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election fair and square—and that Russian political warfare in the race was picayune and irrelevant. (Hillary’s own animosity for Russia began not based on principle or a calculation of U.S. interests, but when the government there continued to pursue its own national interests, declining to be dazzled by her, um, personality and arrival with a plastic button that was supposed to say “reset.”)
Sadly, Beltway Republicans continue to be drawn in by sloppy and false assumptions about Putin, domestic support for his agenda, his objectives, and capabilities. They also have an outsized view of American power and reach in a new world order where we are heavily indebted, no longer a sole superpower, and have a military incapable of winning wars. To that end, congressional Republicans complained mightily that the recently passed defense budget for 2022 was “only” $778 billion. That amount is higher than the biggest Reagan-era budgets grossed up for inflation. Despite this hefty number, we are left with a military unprepared to fight China (and therefore unable to deter war with China). Seemingly no matter how much Congress spends, we never get the Navy and Air Force we need in the Western Pacific. More money isn’t the answer.
Sorry Not Sorry
Speaking of a military incapable of winning wars, remember the hasty U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan that killed no enemy but did obliterate ten unarmed civilians, seven of whom were children? At the time, the head of U.S. Central Command, General Frank McKenzie, said he took full responsibility and put out a video to that effect. Except he didn’t take any responsibility. The Pentagon decided in mid-December that the attack was no big deal and no one would be punished. Seven. Dead. Children. If McKenzie really wanted to take responsibility—which seemingly none of today’s woke flag officers are willing to do, declining to take any risks with their careers even as they ask those whom they command to risk their lives—he would have resigned his command and submitted himself to a court martial for negligent homicide.
Who devised the attack, based on what information from which source? We don’t know. There is a hidden reason for the Biden administration to hold no one in the military or intelligence bureaucracy accountable for the killings. You’ll recall the attack happened on August 29. It came on the heels of the terrorist attack that killed 13 U.S. servicemembers on August 26, which further punctuated the tragic defeat for America in Afghanistan. The White House was pressuring the military to do something in response to the August 26 attack. Just three days later, in what Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley later called a “righteous strike,” seven children lay dead. Did they die as a result of White House political pressure? You betcha. Punishing flag officers and intel bureaucrats, even or especially if they deserve punishment, would result in those Deep State precincts pointing the finger right back at the White House.
Careless Whisper
Have you heard the new song produced for George Michael’s comeback tour titled “Nothing about you without you.” Dripping with forced sexuality, it picks up where “Careless Whisper” left off in 1984.
Actually, the former Wham! star is deceased and “nothing about you without you” is apparently a new principle of statecraft under which the Biden administration is operating. Jen Psaki boasted of the practice at work when Biden had his latest call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on January 2nd:
President Biden underscored the commitment of the United States and its allies and partners to the principle of ‘nothing about you without you.’ He reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Blah blah blah. It would be easy to dismiss this as the latest word salad and ineffectual posturing (“America is back!”) from an administration that is lost at sea. But how pathetic is it that they think this is some sort of achievement or evolution of statecraft? It’s also stupid. When Nixon went to China, did he make sure the Soviets, North Vietnamese, and Taiwanese were in the room? “Howdy Mao and Zhou, I brought these guys, because nothing about you without you.”
George Michael: Did he miss out on a huge comeback with “Nothing about you without you” (extra gay version)?
Polish President Buckles
What do the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Biden State Department have in common? They were both very upset at Polish legislation to trim the sails of a leftwing, foreign-owned media company and happy that Poland’s president bowed to U.S. and neoliberal pressure to veto the legislation. At issue is a TV station in Poland, TVN24, which has been owned by Discovery since 2017. Discovery is the American corporation that owns pointless CNN in conjunction with AT&T.
Can you imagine anyone from the U.S. government or media giving anyone in a free country a lecture on the quality of media? In an October poll, just 7% of Americans said they had a “great deal” of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting. No person or country could look at the modern U.S. media and say “I want that here.”
Understandably some Poles, amid growing disillusionment with the globalist neoliberal project (including the EU), are less than pleased at foreign capital being deployed to support a leftwing and rabidly pro-abortion media property attempting to undermine the government in Warsaw. Poland is not alone: the USA limits foreign ownership of wireless networks and broadcast entities to 25% unless a buyer gets a waiver from the Federal Communications Commission. The British government put a stop to Rupert Murdoch’s attempted purchase of BSkyB because it didn’t like News Corp. Liberal democracies can apparently have a say in how their media is comprised—just not conservative Catholic ones like Poland.
The point is important because conservatives in America have got to get used to the paradox of using government power to thwart those who want unlimited government. There is still a quaint view among many that the marketplace will work everything out. If that were true, when Roger Ailes created Fox News and discovered a small demographic called half of America and made boatloads of money by allowing conservative voices on a TV network, then other major media companies should have rushed into the market. It didn’t happen. Nor will the market fix leftwing censorship of conservatives on properties like Twitter, Facebook, etc.
If we don’t want a media that preaches to our population that America is inherently and forever evil and corrupt, we will need to use the power of government to change media.
Speaking of Media
In the latest edition of Simon and Whiton, Mark and I discuss whether U.S. companies overestimate Chinese business potential.
Have a great week!