RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/bidens_meeting_with_pm_boris_johnson_is_illuminating.html

On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson met Joe Biden at the White House. They had the usual sit-down in the room reserved for heads of state meeting the press. The substance of what they said, as best as I can tell, was pretty meaningless. What was interesting was everything other than the substance. Biden waved his ubiquitous notecards around, revealing how much he needs to be prompted; his staff ensured that no reporters could ask him questions relevant to Americans; both Biden and Boris were masked. It was a theater of the absurd.

Here’s the Daily Mail’s summary:

Joe Biden on Tuesday did not recognize any American reporters for questions during an Oval Office meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his aides cleared out journalists as they tried to query the president.

Biden did attempt to answer one shouted question from a CBS reporter about the crisis on the Southern border but his answer was unclear when White House staff shouted down reporters, covering the president’s attempt to respond as they demanded journalists leave.

‘Violence is not justified,’ Biden appeared to say but the rest of his response was not decipherable.

White House staff even interrupted Johnson as they pushed to get reporters out of the room, shouting over the British prime minister as he and Biden sat in their chairs, watching the chaotic scene unfold as aides ushered journalists out of the Oval Office.

As reporters were ushered out, CBS White House reporter Ed O’Keefe shouted a question to Biden asked about the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border. The administration is facing backlash and criticism following images of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback using whips to round up migrants or prevent them from stepping onto American soil.

But White House aides yelled ‘thank you’ and ‘let’s go’ to the press in the room, herding them out as Biden appeared to try and address the issue. Between the shouting of his aides and the president’s wearing a face mask, it was impossible to make out the majority of what Biden said.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/22/wrong-way-biden-is-taking-the-nation-wildly-off-course/

“Or, perhaps more appropriately, Biden is the new “Wrongway Feldman,” the fictional “Gilligan’s Island” pilot who was described as so incompetent that he once bombed his own airfield. We’ll let history decide which one he resembles most.”

If President Joe Biden’s navigating skills were any good, the southern border would be calm, inflation under control, every American safely out of Afghanistan, and COVID defeated. Instead, we are left to wonder how it is that his sense of direction can be so fabulously wrong.

At his first-ever press conference from the White House in March, a reporter asked Biden about the surge at the border, which happened to coincide with his taking office.

“The truth of the matter is, nothing has changed,” Biden, after suggesting that he’d studied the immigration charts, said. “It happens every single solitary year. There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March.

“The reason they’re coming,” he went on, “is that it’s the time they can travel with the least likelihood of dying on the way because of the heat in the desert.”

At the end of April, Biden reassured the nation that he’d flown past the problem. “Well, look, it’s way down now. We’ve now gotten control.”

Right.

http://Jim%20Geraghty%20https:/www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-chinese-cdc-went-dark-on-their-u-s-counterparts/%0d%0d

You already knew that the Chinese government was spectacularly unhelpful and secretive in the pivotal early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. You probably suspected that any book about the pandemic written by former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb was going to be insightful and illuminating.

But you probably didn’t know how Gottlieb could, in a matter of paragraphs, perfectly illustrate the culpability of the Chinese government in how COVID-19 went from a virus spreading around Wuhan to a global plague that has killed, so far, more than 4.7 million people. Page 48 of Gottlieb’s new book, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic:

[On] January 1, CDC Director Robert Redfield emailed his Chinese counterpart, Dr. George Fu Gao, a virologist and immunologist who had served as director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention since 2017.  After receiving no response, later that day Redfield called Gao to press for more information. By January 3, the two had talked multiple times about the outbreak. The following day, on January 4, Redfield sent Gao another e-mail, again entreating for more information on the situation in Wuhan and requesting that the U.S. CDC staff be given access to the hot zone.

“I would like to offer CDC technical experts in laboratory and epidemiology of respiratory infectious diseases to assist you and China CDC in identification of this unknown and possibly novel pathogen,” Redfield wrote. Gao was emphatic that there was no person-to-person transmission and no evidence of spread within hospitals. Gao’s working theory was that the virus had been spread by contact with an animal, still unidentified, at the Huanan market. All the early cases seemed to be tied to that market. But Gao had sent Redfield a list of the first twenty-seven cases that the Chinese CDC had identified, and Redfield noticed that among them were three clusters where multiple family members were affected – a husband and wife, or a child and a parent. It seemed implausible that to Redfield that multiple members of three different families had all contracted the virus from one zoonotic exposure. Redfield told Gao he was extremely worried this was evidence of human-to-human transmission, urging Gao to look aggressively through local medical admissions for people with matching respiratory symptoms who didn’t identify the food market as a common point of contact.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/progressives-discover-fiscal-restraint-when-it-comes-israel/?utm_source=

Democrats have finally found some spending that they can oppose:

@ryanobles

 A little bit of drama with the Dem passage of the CR/ Debt ceiling in the House. A group of progressives have told leadership they will not vote for the bill if it includes $1b in funding for Israel’s Iron Dome. The flap has led to the Rules Committee to go into recess.

To comprehend just how much contemporary progressives detest Israel, let’s remember that the Iron Dome is a defensive weapon. It has not only saved thousands of Jewish lives from missiles attacks emanating from Islamic terror groups but countless Palestinian lives, as well. Without it, Israel would need to retaliate for strikes with devastating force and be far more proactive in fighting Hamas — and quite likely, be compelled to reinvade Gaza. And yet a faction of Democrats are willing to sink a debt-ceiling hike over our alliance with the only liberal nation in the region.