RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/joe-biden-still-talks-like-a-senator/

His Russia–Ukraine stumbles are the product of somebody who spent decades in a job where off-the-cuff statements have no consequences.

Over the course of the Ukraine–Russia conflict, President Biden has made a number of reckless statements that have undermined or confused American foreign policy. A popular explanation among critics has been that his propensity to make such statements reflects his being gaffe-prone in general and also that he is undergoing an age-driven mental decline. But another explanation is equally likely: He is not being as careful about what he says because his formidable political experience was as a senator, a position in which off-the-cuff statements do not matter as much.

The president’s extemporaneous comments repeatedly have created problems for his administration.

In a January news conference during the run-up to the invasion, Biden talked about the potential response to an offensive by Vladimir Putin and speculated, “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and we end up having to fight about what to do and not do, etc.”

This created uncertainty about the resolve of NATO countries to hold Putin accountable, and top White House officials scrambled to do cleanup.

Last month, during a mostly restrained speech in Poland, Biden went off-script and added the line, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The statement reverberated around the world, as it appeared that the president of the United States was calling for regime change, which would represent a significant escalation in the conflict.

This statement, too, had to be walked back so the White House could tamp down the idea that the U.S. was pushing for Putin’s ouster.

Then there has been the loose talk around war crimes.

Last month, after the conclusion of an event at the White House, Biden initially responded “no” when a reporter asked if he thought Putin was a war criminal, and walked away. But then he made his way back to the reporter and said, “Oh, I think he is a war criminal.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/states-of-covid-performance-economic-schools-study-working-paper-lockdowns-11649621806?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“The NBER working paper presents the data straight without policy conclusions, but here’s one of ours: The severe lockdown states suffered much more on overall social well-being in return for relatively little comparative benefit on health.”

More than two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s time to draw some conclusions about government policy and results. The most comprehensive comparative study we’ve seen to date was published last week as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and it deserves wide attention.

The authors are University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan and Stephen Moore and Phil Kerpen of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. They compare Covid outcomes in the 50 states and District of Columbia based on three variables: the economy, education and mortality. It’s a revealing study that belies much of the conventional medical and media wisdom during the pandemic, especially in its first year when severe lockdowns were described as the best, and the only moral, policy.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/09/fbi-kidnapping-caper-was-flagrant-election-interference

On October 8, 2020, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced shocking news: federal authorities had arrested several men for conspiring to kidnap and possibly kill her before Election Day. After indulging in a moment of self-pity, Whitmer quickly pinned the blame on President Trump, a man with whom Whitmer had engaged in a very public feud throughout 2020 over pandemic-related lockdowns.

Trump, Whitmer claimed, fueled the rage of alleged white supremacists and right-wing militias responsible for the dastardly abduction plot. “When our leaders meet with, encourage, or fraternize with domestic terrorists, they legitimze their actions,” Whitmer said in a televised speech. “And they are complicit.”

Earlier that day, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, also a Democrat, and officials from the U.S. Department of Justice detailed the charges in a separate press conference. “Last night, the FBI and Michigan State Police arrested six individuals charged in a criminal complaint with conspiring to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer,” explained Andrew Birge, assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan. The defendants, Birge claimed, plotted to kidnap Whitmer from her vacation cottage “before the November election.”

His office took the lead in prosecuting the six defendants, who also faced weapons of mass destruction charges.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/09/justice-has-been-and-will-be-a-long-time-coming/

On Friday, April 8, the biggest domestic news came from Grand Rapids, Michigan. On that day the world learned that a jury had voted unanimously to acquit Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta of conspiring to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the fall of 2020. The verdict, as Julie Kelly noted in her column for American Greatness that day, was a “huge defeat for the U.S. Department of Justice.” One can only hope. It was also a huge, if tardy and incomplete, win for justice, lower case, no “Department of” preceding the noun. 

Kelly recounts the sordid details of this saga of FBI entrapment, deep-state political maneuvering, and media malpractice. The case made national headlines and, coming when it did, just before the 2020 presidential election, was clearly designed to affect public sentiment regarding the Donald Trump campaign. “Heavens help us! Troglodytic Trump supporters are trying to kidnap noble Democratic public servants! Can you believe it?” 

Turns out you would have been foolish to believe it. But in retrospect, it seems clear that it was a sort of dry-run for that later entertainment, the January 6 worse-than-Pearl-Harbor or 9/11, Civil-War-like “insurrection” and/or attempt to “overturn the election” and/or overthrow “our democracy” at the U.S. Capitol. 

There were some two dozen people involved in the “Plot to Kidnap Gretchen Whitmer” saga. Fully 12 were FBI assets. They were not there to infiltrate the loser militia members. They were there to egg them on. The FBI helped to define and finance the plot from the beginning. They even set up a fake “militia” for the others to rally around. They also helped to equip, not to mention bribe, the motley crew whom they assembled for the caper. The FBI did not uncover a plot. They were prime movers in fomenting a plot. They did not so much uncover evidence against the plotters as they entrapped them. And it’s not as if this is a one off. It is part of a pattern of abuse and irresponsibility. As the Wall Street Journal’s Holmon Hunt put it last fall, “The agency should be scrapped and something new built to replace it.”

We do not yet know the full extent of government involvement in the January 6 jamboree, but I would not be at all surprised to learn that it was premeditated, extensive, and criminal.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/has_the_fbi_ever_before_looked_this_pitiful.html

It’s one thing for the FBI, once considered the pre-eminent law enforcement agency in the world, to turn to the dark side and become the secret police of the Democrat party.  Again and again, the FBI has shown its partisan colors, overlooking obvious Democrat criminality (see Clinton, Hillary and Biden, Hunter) while chasing after Donald Trump and his supporters like Brian Stelter chasing down a Mister Softee truck for seconds.

But although it’s unsettling to know that the FBI is only supporting one side of the political aisle, what’s truly incredible is how bad the Feebs are at partisan warfare.  Forget stopping actual terrorists, like the ones involved in 9/11, Orlando, and San Bernadino; recent history tells us the Bureau can’t even run a coup right.

Under a previous director as tall as he was self-righteous, the FBI tried to take down presidential candidate Donald Trump (R-MAGA) with the infamous Russia Collusion scam.  But what a lousy effort it was!

The FBI case, such as it was, relied primarily on a dossier —French for “phony opposition research” — centered on a supposed video of prostitutes wetting the bed in a Moscow hotel for Donald Trump’s entertainment.  Talk about purple prose!  I’ve written stuff that lurid and bizarre, but sadly, it never gets published.

Although not-so-special agent Peter Strzok told his horse-faced FBI side piece, “Don’t worry, we’ll stop it (Trump becoming president),” the Feebs’ pathetic plot fell apart, and Trump was elected.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/bill_clintons_supreme_nato_screwup_comes_back_to_haunt_us.html

Writing in the foreign policy mouthpiece of the Biden administration and the Democratic Party, The Atlantic, former president Bill Clinton attempts to defend his decision to begin the post–Cold War expansion of NATO by naming the members of his foreign policy team, especially the late Madeleine Albright, who supported this move against the advice of George F. Kennan — who knew more about Russia and its history and culture than all of Clinton’s advisers combined.

Clinton claims that his approach to Russia and Europe was to “work for the best while preparing for the worst.”  The “best” was helping Russia become a “functioning democracy,” and the “worst” was to expand NATO in case Russia returned to “ultranationalism.”  Clinton writes that he was convinced that Boris Yeltsin would continue Russia along the path toward democracy and cooperation with the West, but he didn’t know who would succeed Yeltsin, so he decided that NATO expansion into lands that had for centuries been considered in Russia’s sphere of influence would serve as insurance against the possibility of Russian nationalist revanchism. Apparently, Clinton and his “brilliant” foreign policy team — Albright, Strobe Talbot, Warren Christopher, Sandy Berger, Anthony Lake — failed to consider whether NATO expansion might produce or at least intensify the very Russian revanchism they sought to prevent.

But the very notion that Russia was headed in the political direction of Western-style “democracy” shows how out of touch Clinton and his foreign policy team were.  This American hubris was reminiscent of FDR’s “hunch” that he could persuade Joseph Stalin to promote postwar stability, or of Woodrow Wilson’s belief that Lenin’s Bolsheviks, who had thrown off Russia’s imperial yoke, were bringing more freedom to Russia; or of Barack Obama’s puzzled reaction to Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 as a misplaced legacy of the 19th century.  George Kennan knew better.

https://eagleforum.org/psr/1998/june98/psrjune98.html

The China Connection Is the Real Scandal

Now we know why the Democrats were so vicious in their attacks on Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) and Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN). Theirs were the committees that were closing in on the China connection, the scandal that can bring down the Clinton presidency, the scandal that has made Congressmen start to utter the T word (treason). A series of front-page news stories in the New York Times (May 15, 16, 17) essentially vindicated Thompson’s charge that the Chinese Communist Government tried to influence the 1996 U.S. election with campaign contributions.

Bill Clinton’s friend and ubiquitous Democratic fundraiser Johnny Chung told Federal investigators that he funneled nearly $100,000 from the Communist Chinese military to the Democratic campaign in the summer of 1996. The money was handed to Chung by the daughter of the top commander of China’s People’s Liberation Army, General Liu Huaqing, who was also one of the top five members of the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling Politburo.

Chung’s liaisons with the Clinton Administration were so cozy that he was able to arrange for the daughter, who goes by the name of Lt. Col. Liu Chaoying, to get a speedy visa and come to America to be photographed with Clinton on July 22, 1996. She is what is called a “princeling,” one of the privileged offspring of China’s ruling elite. In addition to her title as Lieutenant Colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, she is a senior manager and vice president for China Aerospace International Holdings, which is the Hong Kong arm of China Aerospace Corporation, a state-owned jewel in China’s military-industrial complex, with interests in satellite technology, rocket launches, and missiles.

Johnny Chung told Federal investigators that Col. Liu actually gave him $300,000, which she said originated with China’s military’s intelligence arm, and told him to use the money for Democratic campaign contributions. He apparently kept $200,000 for his “businesses.” Soon after the picture-taking fundraiser, Col. Liu had Chung open a California branch of Marswell Investing, another of her Hong Kong enterprises, whose chief “business” was parking Chinese money in the United States. She also invested $300,000 in Chung’s facsimile business. Chung was quite a hustler; he visited Clinton’s White House 49 times.

After fundraising investigations began last year, the Democratic National Committee returned $366,000 to Chung which were suspected of being illegal foreign contributions. Chung has pleaded guilty to campaign-related bank and tax fraud.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/i-tried-to-put-russia-on-another-path/ar-AAVYglE

“This whole column is a paean to himself and Madeleine Albright, and the sorry excuse for a policy team:  Secretary of State Warren Christopher; National Security Adviser Tony Lake; his successor, Sandy Berger; and  Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott.  Shameless Clinton was busy keeping his zipper up while engaging with Communist China.”

When I first became president, I said that I would support Russian President Boris Yeltsin in his efforts to build a good economy and a functioning democracy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—but I would also support an expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact members and post-Soviet states. My policy was to work for the best while preparing for the worst. I was worried not about a Russian return to communism, but about a return to ultranationalism, replacing democracy and cooperation with aspirations to empire, like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. I didn’t believe Yeltsin would do that, but who knew what would come after him?

If Russia stayed on a path toward democracy and cooperation, we would all be together in meeting the security challenges of our time: terrorism; ethnic, religious, and other tribal conflicts; and the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. If Russia chose to revert to ultranationalist imperialism, an enlarged NATO and a growing European Union would bolster the continent’s security. Near the end of my second term, in 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO despite Russian opposition. The alliance gained 11 more members under subsequent administrations, again over Russian objections.

Lately, NATO expansion has been criticized in some quarters for provoking Russia and even laying the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The expansion certainly was a consequential decision, one that I continue to believe was correct.