Is Liz Cheney a Russian Agent?
Biden touts economic framework to nowhere
Liz Cheney thinks very highly of the Russians and their capabilities, enough even to risk nuclear war with Moscow by fighting the Europeans’ war for them.
She thinks Moscow has emplaced “useful idiots” in Congress and miraculously isn’t referring to herself.
She accused former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of “praising Putin.” Pompeo, you’ll recall, was President Trump’s chief diplomat when the USA ended the Obama-Biden policy of sending only blankets to Ukraine and began providing the lethal arms that subsequently enabled Ukraine to mount an effective defense against Russia.
Of Trump himself, Cheney has said that the former president’s supposed “adulation of Putin” somehow “aids our enemies.” Yet, Trump is alone among our last four presidents not to convince Moscow it was just fine to invade a neighbor on his watch. Cheney’s own daddy sat in the vice president’s office in the West Wing as Russia barreled into the nation of Georgia in 2008.
Cheney has imagined a “Putin wing” of the Republican Party of which she is supposedly still a member. One hundred percent of that party’s Senate members just voted to increase sanctions on Russia.
While hyping the picayune Russian involvement in social media during the 2016 presidential election, Cheney said of the Russians: “What they are doing now is potentially much more damaging than just saying we want this presidential candidate or that presidential candidate. They want to destroy our confidence in our entire system.” Adding that “You know, this is a war,” Cheney has since become the most visible member of Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s political star chamber committee that seeks ultimately to label all Trump supporters and those who doubt the ruling elite as threats to democracy. Which activity does more to “destroy confidence?”
While hyping Russia’s impact on U.S. politics, Cheney has also overlooked the elaborate, expensive, and highly effective intervention by Ukraine’s government in our political system, which even included emplacing a sympathizer in the White House, the Ukrainian-born Fat Colonel, who helped get Trump impeached with Cheney’s support, and was offered the job of Ukrainian defense minister.
Cheney and her fellow Lizbians’ imagining of a Russian behind every bush brings to mind an old joke retold here by the LA Times:
Two Jewish men sat on a park bench reading newspapers. One man, reading the Jewish Telegraph, was astonished to see his friend reading the Nazi Press.
“How can you, a Jew, read that garbage?” he questioned.
“Why not?” replied the other. “When I read Jewish newspapers, all I read about is anti-Semitism, vandalism, and how everybody hates us. But when I read the Nazi newspaper, I see only good things. We Jews own Hollywood, we control the media, and we are all doctors, lawyers, and bankers. I really start to feel good!”
Cheney provides a similar service to Moscow. Since Cheney’s criteria for being an agent or “useful idiot” of the Russians isn’t actual collusion with Moscow or definable aid to Putin, but rather anything that Washington neoconservatives and globalists imagine in their fever dreams might be of abstract use to Russia, then by her own definition, Cheney is a Russian agent.
Cheney has done so much to elevate Russia’s reputation in political warfare, it is too bad Moscow no longer awards the Order of Lenin. Clearly she deserves it for “outstanding services rendered to the state.”
Biden’s Woke Comintern
Cheney’s brand of hysteria, globalism, and warmongering has a great complement in the rest of Biden foreign policy. The State Department on Tuesday released its annual human rights report in which Washington judges the rest of the world’s governance. What began in the Carter administration as a critique of the most obvious and egregious human rights violations has evolved into a grand exercise of cultural imperialism in which we alienate friendly foreign governments. Biden’s people also prefaced the report with some woke nonsense:
The Biden Administration has put human rights at the center of U.S. domestic and foreign policy. We have also recognized our nation has not always succeeded in protecting the dignity and rights of all Americans, despite the proclamations of freedom, equality, and justice in our founding documents. It is through the continued U.S. commitment to advance human rights, both domestically and internationally, that we best honor the generations of Americans who are Black [sic], Brown [sic], or other people of color, indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, LGBTQI+ persons, immigrants, women and girls, and other historically marginalized groups whose advocacy for their rights and for others has pushed America toward a “more perfect union.”
Where to start with this failure to understand the magnificence of the American experiment and the unprecedented surge of human freedom it sparked? Presumably the statement referenced “founding documents” instead of “Founding Fathers,” because the latter implies they had a definitive gender even though they didn’t list their pronouns when signing the Declaration of Independence. State could have saved a lot of verbiage by just writing “get whitey.” As a gay man, I find the reference to “LGBTQI+ persons” by my government among the litany of the increasingly reluctant constituencies the Democrats think they own to be obnoxious since I don’t feel aggrieved and in fact am grateful to be American, never suspected the USA or any other human invention of being perfect, and don’t appreciate gay culture being burdened by non-germane groups with gender dysphoria.
Pot shots aside, this is the kind of thinking that led to U.S. embassies displaying banners professing that “black lives matter” and rainbow flags. Less symbolically, preachy wokeness has led to our estrangement from important governments like that of Saudi Arabia, which doesn’t even take calls from our dotard president anymore and does him no favors on oil prices or sanctioning Russia.
The Seinfeld Economic Framework
Seinfeld was famously a show about nothing. The series epitomized the casual, laid back 1990s, running from 1989-1998, and reminds one of a long-ago time when since-desiccated institutions like NBC and the Democratic Party still meant something. Perhaps it was the topic of nothing that inspired the Biden administration to concoct and begin promoting an “Indo-Pacific Economic Framework” without any substance.
Officials throughout Asia have whined that there must be a U.S. economic component to regional diplomacy that has supposedly been missing since President Trump fulfilled a campaign pledge to abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The pact would have exported what is left of U.S. manufacturing to Vietnam.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, who has nothing to show for her pointless, Seinfeldian tenure, was out in Singapore earlier this month touting the vague framework and promising details at an undisclosed point in the future. Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was a good sport while Tai wasted his time talking up the low-cal nothing burger. What little she did offer was summed up in a USTR readout of the meeting:
Tai highlighted the United States’ desire to work with Indo-Pacific partners to establish a high-ambition framework that advances resilience, inclusion, sustainability, and the interests of respective workers and entrepreneurs in the United States, Singapore, and across the region.
Sustainability and inclusion? Expect a framework about investment in transgender-owned windmills. That’ll keep the Chinese down.
Sadly, Taiwan has expressed that it is super-eager to join the Seinfeld framework, but the Biden administration is putting out signals that it won’t let Taiwan join. Someone should tell Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen (or Chen Shuh-chung, the actual dictator of Taiwan by virtue of being health supremo) to stop playing Charlie Brown to Lucy and her football.
I have argued that what the region really needs is a forum to discuss free market capitalist reform. Call it what you like, but the idea would be to shift from seeing economic progress in selling more to the USA by poaching market share and jobs to one in which Trump-style economic reform touches off rapid internal economic growth. That could help everyone from Taiwan to Myanmar and would diminish the relative economic power of the Chinese and their corrupt, communist economy. More: “Free Market Capitalism Trumps Free Trade Gesticulation”
Elon vs. Twitter Censors
In our latest episode, Mark and I discuss Elon Musk’s move against the censors and mediocrities at Twitter, using gold and ammo as currency, and the skills required for smuggling in the southern Philippines. Please subscribe to our video podcast and leave a review on Apple.
Parting Shot
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has endorsed my friend, Jim Bognet, who is running for the House from Pennsylvania’s 8th congressional district. An alum of the Trump administration, Jim won more than 48% of the vote in the tough year of 2020. He’s likely to help flip Congress and Pennsylvania red this fall. Consider lending him your support.
