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March 2022

Conspirators in Their Own Words Noble left-wing ends always justify odious means, in this case projecting one’s own conspiracist efforts by smearing innocent others as conspiracists. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/20/conspirators-in-their-own-words/

For the last five years, the Left—defined as the fusion of the mainstream media, Silicon Valley, the radical new Democratic Party, and the vestigial Hillary Clinton machine—has crafted all sorts of conspiracies to destroy their perceived conservative enemies. 

Their method has focused on one major projection: alleging conspiracy on the part of others, which is a kind of confirmation of their own conspiracies to destroy their opponents in general, and Donald Trump in particular. 

Now they have been caught admitting to such nefariousness. Apparently, they still are exuberant about their slick shamelessness and simply can’t keep quiet. Or they believe radically changed conditions, such as the implosion of the Biden Administration, prompt necessary admissions. 

Hillary’s the One 

For nearly five years anyone who objected that the partisan Christopher Steele and his “dossier” were fraudulent, that Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS was a paid opposition hit team, and their joint birthing of “Trump-Russia collusion” was a myth, was smeared as a denialist or conspiracist. 

But examine what has transpired since 2016. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation found nothing. Mueller in congressional testimony was either addled or disingenuous. He even claimed he knew nothing of Fusion GPS or the dossier, the twin catalysts for his own investigation. 

The more Mueller meandered, the more it was clear that his henchman, partisan lawyer Andrew Weissmann, had hijacked the left-wing “All-Star” and “Dream Team” of lawyers and was running the charade. The more the Left boasted of the legal eagles set to tear apart Trump, the more glaring their failure to find any such evidence supporting their conspiracies. 

The Houthis, Iran’s ‘Weapon of War’ and Iran’s IRGC Must Be on US Terrorist List by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18346/houthis-iran-irgc-terrorist-list

The Houthis are a dangerous and deadly, terrorist group based in Yemen. Recently, senior Houthi leader Mohammed Ali al-Houthi went on an antisemitic tirade in support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stating, “It is because its President is Jewish. Any country run by a Jew ends up going to war.”

Does the Biden administration find such racist, slanderous statements acceptable? Will the Biden administration refute it? Or will they passively accept such slander the same way they passively accepted the Taliban taking over Afghanistan or Putin invading Ukraine?

The Biden administration would do well to make sure that something comes at a cost. It is this backwards and hateful way of thinking that underpins the atrocities being committed by the Houthis in Yemen every day.

The Houthis need to be put back on the List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations immediately — instead of the US taking Iran’s rapacious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) off it. The IRGC, which just claimed credit for attacking the Kurds in Erbil, will simply, while the world is looking the other way, take over Erbil and the rest of Iraq.

“[S]aying that the world’s largest terrorist organization is not a terrorist organization… This is too high a price” for “empty promises from terrorists” on a nuclear deal, according to Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

If the US allows Iran to acquire nuclear weapons capability, you can kiss peace in the region goodbye. That will be President Joe Biden’s legacy.

America’s allies in the Middle East — Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — are raising serious concerns about any new agreement between the U.S. and Iran. They see that embracing Iran comes from a false hope that it will lead to better behavior on the part of its regime and terrorist proxies.

Those statements by one of the Houthis’ top officials give us a clear insight into what we can expect from Iran and its proxies. We should take them at their word.

Let us not make the same mistake the U.S. and Europe made by embracing Russia, or the mistake made in Asia by embracing China. We must recognize the Islamic Republic of Iran for the evil it is and redesignate the Houthis, who operate as a weapon of war for the Iranian regime, as the terrorist organization they are. The strategy of hope did not work for Russia or China, and it will not work with Iran.

Too often the West finds itself hoping for and seeing a positive outcome when reality presents something very different. Think about the West’s response to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, where we promoted Western values of openness as a replacement for Communism. Consider the vote by Congress in 2000 to grant China Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status, a status I voted against when in Congress. Reflect on President Barack Obama negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2015. None of these major deals has worked the way the West and the United States had expected or hoped.

The Right Reason to Oppose Judge Jackson By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-right-reason-to-oppose-judge-jackson/

As I’ve separately contended, some of the arguments being made against President Biden’s nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are unworthy. Nevertheless, though it seems certain that she will be confirmed, her progressive judicial philosophy is a meritorious basis to vote against her, for the reasons outlined by Ed Whelan last week.

I could not disagree more with the assertion of a moderate Republican group of Judge Jackson’s supporters that “the question for the Senators is not whether this is a nomination that they would make, but whether the President has put forward a nominee well qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.” (See the letter in Ed’s post, linked above.)

That is more analogous to the question for senators with regard to nominees the president puts forward for executive-branch positions. While such positions involve critical duties, the executive appointee’s task is to carry out the elected president’s policies; thus, the principal confirmation issue is whether the nominee has the intellect, competence, and character that befits the position of trust, not whether we agree with the nominee’s politics or would ourselves have chosen the nominee.

Lifetime judicial appointments are very different, and those to Supreme Court seats are obviously significant — I hesitate to say “the most” significant because I believe a bad district judge, who is a court of one, can do more damage than a bad Supreme Court justice, who deals with many fewer cases and whose meanderings will rarely be decisive.

A funeral in Israel shows the remarkable power of faith By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/a_funeral_in_israel_shows_the_remarkably_power_of_faith.html

“The most important difference, though, as those 750,000 or more mourners show, is religious people have babies, lots and lots of babies. Secular people do not. Secular Europe is dying (including Russia, which no longer has the wherewithal to throw bodies into battle as it once did), while religious communities are demographically booming.”

On Friday, March 18, in Bnei Brak, a city near Tel Aviv, Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky passed away at the age of 94. I’m sure that means very little to you. Unless you are an ultra-Orthodox Jew whose life is dedicated to the study of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible), your life will not have intersected with Rabbi Kanievsky’s. However, he was important enough to Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community that, on Sunday, over 750,000 men (or almost 8.5% of Israel’s total population) poured into the streets of Bnei Brak to be part of his funeral.

Still, why should that matter to you? It matters because a religious text that’s around 2,500 years old in its present form and existed in other forms before then, and that recognizes and seeks to tame and elevate human behavior, has such power. Compared to that, today’s wokism, firmly grounded in fantasy, cannot and will not last.

Because the Daily Mail has the best photographs, I’ll quote from its report:

Born in Pinsk, Belarus, he had moved to the country when he was a child and when it was still British-ruled Palestine. He remained there for the rest of his life, becoming revered by many in the Jewish religious world, and was one of the few remaining leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel born before the Holocaust. 

Police closed several highways in Israel’s densely populated Tel Aviv area to traffic for several hours, and other main thoroughfares were expected to be gridlocked. Authorities urged the public not to drive into the area by car.

A separate women’s section was created in the streets of Bnei Brak for the funeral that the Magen David Adom, Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross, said was likely to be one of the largest ever gatherings in ‘Israeli history.’ 

Rather to my surprise, Reuters live-streamed all two hours of the event.

There’s A Critical Vacancy In The Oval Office By Mark Christian

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/03/theres_a_critical_vacancy_in_the_oval_office.html

“The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history,” said President John Kennedy on April 20, 1961. “Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined, only the courageous, only the visionary who determine the real nature of our struggle can possibly survive.”

On that fateful April day, Kennedy honored his commitment to speak to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Many presidents would have ducked it. Three days before, with Kennedy’s authorization and the CIA’s guidance, thousands of Cuban-Americans launched a disastrous landing at what we know as the Bay of Pigs. While Kennedy spoke, the final act of this sad drama was still unfolding.

Today, can anyone imagine President Joe Biden facing a roomful of skeptical editors and owning up to his disastrous blunders in Ukraine. This is no more likely than him learning anything, as JFK did, from the mistakes he has made.

Honesty has never been part of Biden’s nature. For years, America tolerated his lies because he and they seemed inconsequential. He was just one vote out of 100 in the U.S. Senate. And as vice president, a position predecessor John Nance Garner described as “not worth a bucket of warm piss,” Biden remained more or less harmless.

Lia Thomas and the ‘Authentic Self’ Stealing the brass ring. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/lia-thomas-and-authentic-self-bruce-bawer/

If the New York Times poses as America’s newspaper of record, presenting every day’s news through the lens of woke ideology and the Democratic Party narrative, the New Yorker is our flagship “serious” weekly magazine. So when the New Yorker runs a sober 5700-word article about what is arguably, in the minds of our woke brethren, the major issue of the day – namely, trans athletes – it merits notice. The text in question, dated March 17, was written by sports journalist Louisa Thomas (hereafter “Louisa”) and focused primarily on University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas (hereafter “Lia”), who at a meet in Atlanta last Thursday became, as ESPN reported, “the first known transgender athlete to win a Division I national championship in any sport.”

Lia was born Will Thomas in 1998 or 1999 and, according to Louisa, “realized she was transgender in the summer of 2018.” But you won’t find the name Will Thomas in Louisa’s article, which begins as follows:

Lia Thomas has been swimming since she was five years old. As a high schooler, she was one of the top swimmers in Texas, an All-American. She followed her older brother onto the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania, and established herself as a strong competitor in distance races; in her sophomore season, at the Ivy League championships, she finished second in three events.

In fact, during all that time, Lia was Will. And Will was a “he.” Lia is a “he,” too, of course. But in the year 2022, under the rules set down by our woke overlords, we are expected to pretend that Will’s decision four years ago to start calling himself Lia, and to identify as a “she,” had the magical effect of retroactively rewriting his entire life, turning Will Thomas into a girl from the moment of his birth

Biden’s Handlers Are Preparing to Eject Him (and Kamala) They must replace him, otherwise they themselves risk being replaced, which would be intolerable. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/19/bidens-handlers-are-preparing-to-eject-him-and-kamala/

I sense a disturbance in the force. In fact, I’ve been feeling the tremors for a while. Back in January, I wrote a column for American Greatness called “The Coming Dethronement of Joe Biden.” In it, I noted that Biden’s appalling performance as president would sooner or later—and probably sooner, given the ostentatious nature of his multifaceted failure—lead to his removal as president. 

I should have added that it wasn’t Biden’s performance per se that would lead to his downfall. The problem, rather, was the way his performance was undermining his—and therefore his minders’ and puppetmasters’—political power. As Saul Alinsky, community organizer to the stars, noted, the “issue is never the issue.” Accordingly, the people who put Joe Biden in power—I cannot name them, but I know they are the same people who keep him in power—do not care about inflation, rising gas and food prices, COVID lockdowns or mask mandates, the porousness of our Southern border, the threat of war with Russia, or the myriad other issues that worry ordinary voters. I am quite certain, in fact, that the word “voters” brings a vaguely contemptuous smile to their faces. 

They are not troubled by the suffering of the people, indeed, they approve of a certain amount of suffering. Suffering produces dependency; and dependency, in turn, is like an insurance policy for those who cater to it: the bureaucrats who fill the troughs that feed the populace. The point, of course, was never to end the dependency but to manage in such a way as to perpetuate and expand it. Joe Biden is an errand boy, a figurehead, in the metabolism of this great (not to say Great Society) act of political legerdemain. 

Back in January, I compared the conundrum that Joe Biden presented to The Committee that keeps him in power with the conundrum that Richard Nixon presented to the elites of his day. Nixon was hated by all the beautiful people of his day, but before he could be disposed of the elites had to address the problem of Spiro Agnew, who in his own way was nearly as preposterous as Kamala Harris. Fortunately for the anti-Nixon forces, Agnew was also corrupt in a pedestrian, easy-to-demonstrate sort of way. So all that the forces of light and virtue had to do was produce evidence of his glomming on to paper bags full of pelf in exchange for favors rendered and, presto, Agnew was history. 

Kamala Harris is more of a problem. She is at least as appallingly incompetent as her boss, and no less challenged rhetorically, as her alarming performance in Poland and Romania a week or two back demonstrated. But Harris will not be as easy to shift as was Agnew. I have heard nothing about actual bribery, and acting as the warm bun for Willie Brown’s bratwurst may be in dubious taste but is not actionable.