THE RANT OF A CRAZED DEMAGOGUE :JOHN PODHORETZ

https://www.tothepointnews.com/2022/01/the-rant-of-a-crazed-demagogue/

A portrait of demented darkness of soul

In a disgraceful performance yesterday (1/11), Joe Biden went down to Georgia to offer a disgraceful pack of lies about the filibuster and Democrats’ so-called “voting rights” bills.

In a scathing address on the Senate floor today (1/12), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell ripped into Biden’s Georgia speech on the Democrat push for voting rights legislation, calling it “profoundly unpresidential” for calling millions of Americans “domestic enemies” while comparing “a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors.”

McConnell is accurate – for Biden made it clear, if you don’t support his two voting bills — and if you don’t support ending the Senate filibuster on bills involving voting — you are no better than two of the worst Americans of the 20th century and one of the worst of the 19th.

Biden’s was a demagogic rant designed to make Twitter blue-checks do a Snoopy dance of joy while embracing an effort with no chance of actual success.  He actually said this:

“I ask every elected official in America, do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

So congratulations to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the two Democratic senators who have made it plain they will not vote to kill the filibuster.

Biden’s Budget Priorities and the China Threat by Chris Farrell

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18040/biden-budget-china-threat

There is nothing [in the US budget] specifically targeting and countering the Chinese biowarfare threat and resultant global pandemic that has seized the world for nearly two years. Nothing. Instead, there is specific reference to military crisis communications – the sort Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley clearly exercised on October 20, 2020 when he told the Chinese military chief: “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.” General Milley has yet to be indicted.

There are other examples of outrageous programs and wild spending –– on everything from “desert fish” to Critical Race Theory indoctrination programs across all departments and levels of government.

Meanwhile, China surges ahead with military and technical advances — at a pace that has caught the US government by surprise. China’s hypersonic missile test in October 2021 seems to have caught the Pentagon flat-footed. Hypersonic missiles travel at around 3,800 mph and higher, and are ideal for evading traditional missile detection and defense systems. China is also ready to launch its first “blue water” aircraft carrier — giving it the ability to project air and sea power around the globe.

Just recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that China is seeking its first military base on the Atlantic Ocean.

The Biden administration is spending American taxpayers’ dollars recklessly on “tree equity” programs

Reading Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior, one is reminded of how FDR grossly ignored the looming threat from Japan and how Biden ignores China’s aggression today.

Which is more urgent?: Does the US need a nearly $5 trillion budget for an immediate deterrence to China’s biowarfare and military buildup, or for climate change and green programs? And are those climate change and green programs largely paybacks to campaign donors and to China?

FBI Refuses to Explain FBI Role in January 6 By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/11/fbi-refuses-to-explain-fbi-role-in-january-6/

A top official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation repeatedly refused to disclose how many FBI agents and informants were involved in the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021.

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday morning, Jill Sanborn, executive assistant director of the FBI’s national security branch, cited privileged protocols as to why she would not tell Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) the number of FBI assets that “actively participated” in the protest. “Sir, I’m sure you can appreciate that I can’t go into sources and methods,” Sanborn, who served as assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division when the protest erupted on January 6 and would have full knowledge of FBI undercover operations, told Cruz.

The Texas senator also demanded to know if FBI agents committed any violent crimes or incited any violent crimes on January 6. Sanborn again declined to answer. Presenting photos of Ray Epps, a man caught on video on both January 5 and 6, imploring people to “go into the Capitol” but has not been charged with any crime, Cruz asked Sanborn whether she knew Epps. “I’m aware of the individual, sir, I don’t have the specific background to him,” Sanborn replied.

“Miss Sanborn, was Ray Epps a fed?” Cruz asked. Again, Sanborn said she could not answer the question. Cruz also asked why, based on reporting by Darren Beattie at Revolver News, Epps’ “magically disappeared” from the FBI’s Most Wanted List related to January 6.

Again, Sanborn had no answer.

Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan step forward to fight Pelosi’s Jan. 6 witch hunt By David Zukerman

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/mark_meadows_jim_jordan_step_forward_to_fight_pelosis_jan_6_witch_hunt.html

Mark Meadows, former chief of staff to President Trump, filed an amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court, January 7, in support of the former president’s claim that his official papers should be covered by executive privilege and not released to the Jan. 6 House Select Committee.  The matter is now on appeal before the Supreme Court as a result of the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upholding the decision by President Biden that executive privilege is not justified to keep the Trump papers from the Select Committee.  The appellate ruling from Judge Patricia Millett included the curious assertion, at the top, of “multiple” deaths at the Capitol, January 6, 2021, with the added contention that the Trump-supporting “mob” came armed with “weapons.”  The only violent death was that of Trump-supporter Ashli Babbitt, shot and killed by a Capitol cop.  There were no reports of demonstrators carrying arms, to my knowledge.   

A comment in the amicus brief goes  to the heart of this matter.  “For Executive Privilege to fulfill its intended purpose of allowing full and free communication among Presidential advisors, it must be able to survive a party change in the Presidency and a hostile Congress.”   If there were any doubt of the hostility that President Biden (and congressional Democrats) have for  Donald J. Trump, those doubts should have been dispelled by the following excerpts from Mr. Biden’s denunciation of his predecessor, January 6, 2022. 

Year Two of The Administration From Hell But will it end well in November? Don Feder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/if-you-hated-2021-youll-2022-even-less-don-feder/

If 2021 was scary, 2022 — the 2nd year of the administration from Planet Stupid — will build on that disaster. You don’t need a crystal ball or the ghost of Nostradamus to see what lies ahead, and it won’t be pretty.

1. The administration will continue to blame everyone and everything for the failure of its perverse policies. We were told that COVID is responsible for snatch and grab, something called the “meat conglomerate” made chicken prices take wing, and greedy oil companies are to blame for pain at the pump. Could destroying domestic energy production possibly have anything to do with rising prices? Impossible! To suggest such a thing shows you don’t understand economics, a la AOC.

2. Chaos at the border will be the new normal. In its move to swamp the nation with welfare-state voters, the administration will continue to open the floodgates to drugs, disease, poverty, human trafficking and crime. The Border Patrol has been replaced by a revolving door.

3.  We’ll continue to fight inflation with spending. – We’ll keep spending to fight a virus that’s increasingly irrelevant. We’ll spend to fight a crime wave that anti-police policies set in motion. We’ll spend to hire more police when fewer and fewer want the job. We’ll spend on education for schools that are closed. We’ll throw money at rising prices – which is like dousing wildfires with gasoline.

4. Biden’s mental health will continue to decline. Don’t believe me? Ask President Harris. We’ll get more of those classic Joe moments, when the president stares off blankly into space at the end of a speech. Chef Boyar-dumb will keep serving up word salads. The sad old man will shuffle through a nation in ruins.

The Gumption for a Civil War? Are we in a time of unprecedented political polarization? Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/we-dont-have-gumption-civil-war-bruce-thornton/

This new year we’ve heard a lot of talk from the Left about another civil war just over the horizon. The partisan divide, as the argument from the Guardian goes, has worsened to the point that the “American political system has become so overwhelmed by anger that even the most basic tasks of government are increasingly impossible . . . The crises the United States now faces in its basic governmental functions are so profound that they require starting over.”  The Right knows this, the Guardian warns, but the Left is mired in intramural quarrels. As John Sexton summarizes this argument, “We need to burn down everything (including the Constitution) and start over.”

Much of this melodramatic prophecy bespeaks the progressives’ anxiety over the coming November electoral backlash against their manifest political failures and arrogant assaults on our unalienable rights, from tyrannical covid mitigation policies, to blatantly racist, anti-American school curricula. And for over a century, progressive technocrats have thrived on existential crises real and imagined, the “moral equivalent of war,” as William James put it in 1906, that demands expanded government power and diminished citizen freedom. Prophecies of actual war reflect the progressives’ habit of using hyperbolic rhetoric to gin up the panic and fear that justify increasing the nanny-state’s aggrandizement of more power.

But such prophecies are unlikely to come true, if only because most of the American people don’t have the gumption to kill and die for much of anything. The young who usually do most of the fighting in war particularly are––with the exceptions comprising our armed forces and other young patriots–– unsuited for the suffering and sacrifice that real war exacts.

First, however, we should point out that the laments over our “polarization,” “partisan rancor,” and lack of “bipartisanship” as comprising a novel, dangerous crisis hurtling us to war, bespeak an ignorance of both history and the structure of our political order.

More Than 230 Colleges, Universities Include Some Form of Critical Race Theory Training

https://humanevents.com/2022/01/10/report-more-than-230-colleges-universities-include-some-form-of-critical-race-theory-training/

More than 230 colleges and universities in the United States have some form of mandatory student training or coursework on ideas related to critical race theory. 

As reported by Fox News, at least 236 colleges or universities have some form of student training on critical race theory. Of those are 149 institutions that have some kind of mandatory faculty or staff training, with 138 mandating school-wide curricular requirements. 

CriticalRace.org, which compiles research from more than 500 institutions, told Fox News that these programs focus on things like “anti-racism,” “equity,” “implicit bias” and critical race theory. 

“Our database shows how race has become a pervasive focus in higher education with a near universal insistence that racism is systemic in the United States,” William A. Jacobson, a Cornell law professor who founded the database, said. 

He added that “higher ed is focused on what divides people, exacerbating rather than solving problems.” 

The critical race theory-associated content appears within curriculum, staff training and sometimes within training related to hiring. 

Some colleges and universities even have required diversity-related content as part of students’ coursework. 

Shortages Are Everywhere — Here’s Why It’s Biden’s Fault

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/12/bareshelvesbiden-saved-christmas-but-not-the-new-year/

Just before the holiday, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki took to the press room podium to laughably brag about how “we’ve saved Christmas” because President Joe Biden supposedly fixed the nation’s supply chain crisis. She said that “President Biden recognized this challenge early, acted as an honest broker to bring key stakeholders together, and focused on addressing practical problems across the global supply chain.”

That was good enough for the mainstream media, which had turned a blind eye to the supply chain problems once Biden claimed he had a plan to fix it.

Except, less than three weeks later, #BareShelvesBiden is trending on Twitter, shoppers are sharing pictures of empty store shelves, and the media are being forced – however reluctantly – to report that shortages are actually a worsening problem.

Shortages are everywhere. Whether it’s goods, food, people, COVID tests, you name it. The CEO of the Gristedes supermarket chain is warning of meat and egg shortages. The Daily Beast reports that “shortages of glass and other materials continue, coupled with extensive shipping delays and skyrocketing freight costs.” One site asked readers to send examples of shortages, and cold medicine was in the top five.

A newspaper in Cape Cod finds “empty grocery shelves and downsized restaurant menus rising amid supply chain struggles.”

James Comey and Our Poisoned Politics Five years ago, the FBI boss was busy selling the bogus Steele dossier.James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-comey-and-our-poisoned-politics-11641944998?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

This week marks the fifth anniversary of perhaps the greatest media scandal of our age. Outlets like CNN and BuzzFeed flogged a bogus dossier of salacious claims funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign, even while admitting they didn’t know whether the dossier’s allegations against Donald Trump were true or false. It wasn’t necessarily that reporters had mistaken fake news for the real stuff—they simply didn’t care or acknowledge that they had an obligation to vet anti-Trump claims before disseminating them.

The pathetic media excuse for running with the story was that important people in the government were talking about it. And no one wanted to talk about it more than the FBI’s then-director, James Comey. He kept talking about it even after his department had failed to corroborate it, and even though the CIA viewed it as mere “Internet rumor.”

On this day five years ago, Mr. Comey emailed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. As the dossier story was raging in the press, Mr. Comey mounted an unsuccessful effort to stop Mr. Clapper from publicly acknowledging that U.S. intelligence agencies had not deemed the dossier reliable and were not relying upon its claims, which had been compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

Are You With Joe Biden, or Jefferson Davis? The President’s speech on voting rights is divorced from reality.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-you-with-joe-biden-or-jefferson-davis-georgia-voting-rights-filibuster-11641943418?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Every official in America, President Biden said Tuesday, has a choice: “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. [ Martin Luther ] King or George Wallace ? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor ? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis ?” Seriously, he said that grandiloquent nonsense.

Mr. Biden’s speech in Georgia was a call to bulldoze the Senate’s filibuster to pass a rebranded version of H.R.1, a bill that would impose a federal election code on all 50 states, including forcing them to count late mail ballots that lack postmarks. If you happen to think that’s a bad idea, or that it’s unconstitutional, or that nuking the filibuster would hurt the Senate, well, then apparently you’re against Abraham Lincoln.

Mr. Biden’s demagoguery is all the worse because he continues to distort state voting laws like the one in Georgia. “Voting by mail is a safe and convenient way to get more people to vote,” he said, adding “they’re limiting the number of dropboxes and the hours you can use them.” Georgia had zero dropboxes before the pandemic election of 2020, and now they’re enshrined in permanent law. This isn’t “ Jim Crow 2.0,” no matter how many times Mr. Biden uses that incendiary phrase.

People disagree about the security of stand-alone dropboxes, but voters can also put absentee ballots in the mailbox. As for Georgia, all of its residents can request a mail ballot without giving an excuse, unlike in New York or Delaware. And here’s a figure Mr. Biden should know: In 2020, the Census Bureau says, black voter turnout in Georgia was 64%, compared with Massachusetts’s 36%.