NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Paul du Quenoy Memory Challenged Was President Biden’s disastrous press conference the beginning of the end?

Posted By on February 13th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/bidens-disastrous-press-conference

“My memory is fine!” insisted a defensive President Joe Biden at a hastily convened press conference last Thursday, at which he identified Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico and blanked on the name of the cathedral where he received a rosary upon the death of his son Beau. For much of the press conference, Biden, 81, resorted to indignation to bat away questions about his mental acuity from an unusually insistent White House press corps.

Just before the press conference was called, Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur released what should have been welcome news for the Biden administration: a 345-page report concluding that the president should face no criminal charges over his improper storage of top-secret government documents and sharing of top-secret information with a ghost writer who held no security clearance. Hur’s report, however, also found that Biden displayed significant memory lapses during the investigation, including an inability to state when he had served as vice president or the year in which his son died. Biden, Hur concluded, is an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

Were it not for Biden’s ill-advised press conference, the main topic of discussion might have been the legal implications of Hur’s report. Biden and his supporters could have claimed vindication, while his opponents might have carped about prosecutorial double standards in light of Donald Trump’s federal indictment for broadly similar alleged offenses. But after Biden left the podium, the desperation was like blood in the water for the beltway sharks, who closed in to feed on a public relations catastrophe—a “nightmare,” according to an anonymous Democratic congressman interviewed by NBC News.

Doubts about Biden’s mental competency can no longer be ignored in any serious analysis of American electoral politics. As long ago as May 2023, a Washington Post/ABC poll found that only 32 percent of Americans believed Biden had the “mental sharpness” to serve as president, against a majority that thought so only three years earlier, when candidate Biden led the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. By last September, however, a CNN poll found that 73 percent of Americans were seriously concerned about Biden’s physical and mental competence, and that 67 percent of Democrats favored another nominee for their party in 2024. Four days before this week’s press conference, an NBC poll registered Biden’s lowest approval rating ever, 37 percent. More than three-quarters of those surveyed said that they have “major” or “moderate” concerns about Biden’s health in a second term, which would end in his 86th year, with the “major” category accounting for 62 percent. Only 11 percent registered no concern.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

When Terrorists Rule Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on February 13th, 2024

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

Staffan Tillander, a retired Swedish diplomat, wrote an assessment of terrorist-stronghold territories published by the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune.

XX is only estimated to have perhaps 4 to 5000 fighters, but it thrives on rifts and conflicts in society … threatening (the people) into obedience and forcing them to supply the group with support and people. It extorts “taxes” from businesses and individuals and kidnaps children and forces them to become fighters. As long as XX controls land in YY, peace and development will remain an uphill battle, with constant setbacks …

If XX teaches us anything, it is the danger posed by an entrenched terrorist group. It is urgent to stop jihadist terrorist groups, wherever they appear, to block their advance and to roll back their control. In YY, they have been able to infiltrate and permeate society and its institutions, use banks and companies to launder money, control trade and harbors, and to prevent peace and state-building efforts.

No, it is not Hamas in Gaza.

Tillander was writing about Al Shabab in Somalia.

But the principle is the principle. It is impossible to create a safe, prosperous civil society when the levers of power are in the hands of terrorists. This is the conclusion Israel has reached—not only regarding Hamas in Gaza but with the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria.

Yet, American diplomacy is still wedded to the “two-state solution,” suggesting—no, insisting—that there cannot be peace in the Middle East until the Palestinians have an independent state, but without consideration of what happens if you give more power to terror organizations. And the P.A. is no less a terror organization than Hamas.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Coleman Hughes on the New Racism The rise of a new race consciousness has turned elite American institutions into neoracist strongholds. By Coleman Hughes

Posted By on February 13th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/coleman-hughes-on-the-new-racism?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

My book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, is about our turning away from a central idea that animated the work of the great civil rights leaders of the twentieth century: color blindness. The principle of color blindness does not mean that we pretend we don’t recognize race. The definition I espouse is that we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives. 

But our society keeps failing to enshrine color blindness as its guiding ethos. It is this ongoing failure that has allowed state-sanctioned racism to emerge again and again in new and different forms—most recently through the movement I call neoracism. 

Neoracists and white supremacists are both committed to different flavors of race supremacy. They both deny our common humanity. They both deny that all races are created equal. They both agree that some races are superior to others, and they both agree that not all people deserve to be treated equally in society. The animating feeling behind neoracism is that people of color are morally superior to white people—that people of color are better at being good people. That’s at the core. The truth, which should be obvious, is that no race is morally superior to any other. 

Martin Luther King never wavered on the importance of our common humanity and the goal of transcending race. Nor did he waver on his preference for class-based policy over race-based policy. 

Today’s neoracists sound nothing like Dr. King yet they claim his mantle. They enjoy the moral authority of being seen as the carriers of his legacy while simultaneously betraying the very ideals that he stood for. It is the rise of this race consciousness that’s turned elite American institutions into neoracist strongholds. 

I will lay out here some of the reasons I think neoracism is a detrimental ideology that undermines social progress and that harms black people in specific ways. First, I will illustrate this with a story about my paternal grandfather. 

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Trump could ride Special Counsel’s report all the way to the White House but only if he avoids these potholes

Posted By on February 13th, 2024

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-ride-special-counsels-report-way-white-house-avoids-potholes

Former President Donald Trump can ride Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Joe Biden’s “diminished faculties” all the way to the White House if he does these three things:

1. Leans into voters’ concerns about the disastrous border crisis – and tells them how he’ll fix it.

2. Talks up his plan to keep the economy humming through deregulation, keeping taxes low and also by pushing his “Drill Baby Drill” plan to expand America’s energy stockpile and independence, and…        

3. Shuts up about everything else. Don’t feed Democrat narratives with threats to abandon NATO or impose 60% tariffs on China. Stop whining about the 2020 election, stop denigrating rival and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s husband and wardrobe, and lay off President Joe Biden. The president is destroying his reelection hopes all by himself; he doesn’t need any help. 

Also, talk less about what a great job you did before and more about how you’ll do it again, even better. Voters want to know and they want optimism. 

There’s been a lot of chatter about what Joe Biden should do to confront the terrible blow delivered by Special Counsel Hur. There has been less commentary about how the presumed GOP nominee should navigate this gift from the blue. My view – don’t interrupt Biden’s decline and fall.  

Odds makers have Donald Trump in the lead, with one site giving him a 52% chance of winning in November, against 27% for Biden. Shockingly, Michelle Obama is next most likely to become president, with a 15% chance. That says everything. 

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The U.S. Must Re-Focus on Curbing Iran’s Nuclear Program By Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on February 13th, 2024

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/us-must-re-focus-curbing-iran%E2%80%99s-nuclear-program-209298

Iran’s latest nuclear and ballistic missile advances make Israel’s war with Hamas and America’s skirmishing with Iranian proxy forces look like regional sideshows of a far more ominous main event.

The current situation in the region gives Iran “a unique opportunity and amplified internal justification for building nuclear weapons while the United States and Israel’s resources to detect and deter Iran from succeeding are stretched thin…,” the Institute for Science and International Security wrote in a new report. “[F]or the first time in years, we are facing the real possibility that Iran may choose to weaponize its nuclear capabilities and build nuclear weapons.”

It wouldn’t take Tehran long to do so. With a large stockpile of uranium enriched to sixty percent purity, the institute estimated that the regime could further enrich enough uranium to weapons-grade purity, with the ability to produce a nuclear bomb in a week. Along with strengthening its nuclear infrastructure through building more reactors, enriching more uranium, and refusing to cooperate with international nuclear inspectors, Tehran also continues to advance its ballistic missiles, which could carry nuclear warheads to strike U.S. allies in the region and possibly even the United States itself. In January, the Islamic Republic launched a satellite 450 miles into space, using technologies with “significant overlap” with those of longer-range ballistic missiles.

The implications of Iran’s nuclear-related advances are enormous. Iran could launch an attack against the United States or Israel, its most hated adversaries. Furthermore, it could also transfer a bomb to a proxy (e.g., Hamas or Hezbollah) to use against Israel or another adversary.

All of this demands U.S.-led action on at least two fronts.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

China’s Infiltrators: ‘They Are Coming Here to Kill Us’ Gordon Chang

Posted By on February 13th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20388/china-infiltrators-us

China’s Communist Party is at this moment putting in place the infrastructure in America to attack America.

[I]n Reedley, California, near Fresno, authorities found a secret Chinese biological weapons lab with at least 20 pathogens, including the one for Ebola, and almost a thousand mice that had been genetically engineered to spread disease.

Chinese agents, in addition to hobbling Americans with disease and gunning them down, could bomb power stations, attack military bases, start wildfires, poison reservoirs, or create terror in dozens of ways.

These tactics come straight out of Unrestricted Warfare, a 1999 book written by two Chinese air force colonels and first published by the PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House in Beijing. The colonels argued that China can and should employ any tactic in attacking a militarily superior United States. Now, Americans can see how Beijing is operationalizing the suggestions in this how-to manual.

Chinese attackers are already in America, more are arriving by the day, and they are armed.

Videos posted to X (Twitter) show Chinese migrants firing pistols. One video is of a Chinese female with a sniper rifle.

There is no Second Amendment in China, and Chinese citizens are not permitted to possess firearms. So is it possible that the shooters in the videos are merely taking advantage of a new-found freedom in their new home country ?

Unlikely.

One of the migrants videoed was in America for only three weeks and arrived in the country with no money and no identification.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Contemplating the Unthinkable: Harris 2024 By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on February 13th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/contemplating-the-unthinkable-harris-2024/

EXCERPT:

Kamala Harris’s Chances

Late last week, after President Biden’s disastrous prime-time press conference, our Phil Klein delivered an assessment that sounded insane . . . and yet, in light of recent events, deserves serious consideration: “Democrats would be better off facing Donald Trump with [Kamala] Harris as their presidential nominee than taking their chances with a rapidly declining [Joe] Biden.”

I can hear readers now: Harris is a joke, a liability, a walking disaster who is so self-evidently a weak candidate and leader that not a single prominent Democrat has called upon Biden to announce he’s serving just one term.

But as these past few days have made abundantly clear, Biden’s age is the single biggest problem jeopardizing the Democrats’ chances of keeping the White House. Never mind that a super-majority of Americans thinks Biden is too old to serve another term; a super-majority of Democrats thinks Biden is too old to serve another term, according to the latest polling from ABC News:

According to the poll, conducted using Ipsos’ Knowledge Panel, 86 percent of Americans think Biden, 81, is too old to serve another term as president. That figure includes 59 percent of Americans who think both he and former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, are too old and 27 percent who think only Biden is too old. . . .

73 percent of Democrats think Biden is too old to serve.

This is a problem that cannot be fixed. Biden cannot get younger. There’s something a little sad about Democrats who think that the problem can be solved if the White House and Biden campaign staff just put the president in front of the cameras more:

Top party operatives are warning Biden aides that the president cannot retreat in response to the special counsel report that fueled concerns over his age and mental faculties. They say President Joe Biden, having largely shied away from interviews and press conferences, needs to be out in public far more.

They want to see him engage with the press and voters in the off-script and punchy exchanges he’s been known for in the past, which they believe will help chip away at concerns about the president’s mental acuity. They say that it’s worth the risk of potential slip-ups that could reinforce the image that he’s declining.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Rescued Hostages a Blow to Biden’s Effort to Thwart Israel By Philip Klein

Posted By on February 13th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/rescued-hostages-a-blow-to-bidens-effort-to-thwart-israel/

By carrying out a daring military operation in Rafah that rescued two hostages, Israel sent two important messages to President Biden. One, operations in Rafah are necessary to destroy Hamas. And two, hostages can be secured by military action, and not merely through negotiations that demand Israel abandon its war aims.

As Biden has been cratering in polls and increasingly convinced that he needs to reassure the anti-Israel base of his party, he has taken to lashing out at our ally both privately (by calling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an obstinate “a**hole”) and publicly by claiming that Israel’s response to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust has been “over the top.”

What Biden hopes is that he can convince Israel to swallow a tremendously one-sided hostage deal that would involve Israel releasing many times more Hamas prisoners and agreeing to a cease-fire of several months, with the aim of making it permanent. Israel has made significant progress in dismantling Hamas’s grip on Gaza, but the frenzied negotiations are happening as Israel is preparing to take Rafah, the last major stronghold of the terrorist group.

The Biden administration claimed at the beginning of the war that it supported Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas, but now Biden and his team are trying to kneecap Israel before the job is done. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said that an Israeli operation in Rafah would be a “disaster” and “not something we would support.” Biden just yesterday told Netanyahu, according to a White House–supplied readout, that “a military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the more than one million people sheltering there.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Xi Misreads the Taiwan Battlefield Frank Mount

Posted By on February 13th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/11/how-xi-misreads-the-taiwan-battlefield/

In any war between China on the one hand and Taiwan, Japan, the US and their allies on the other, Chinese vessels of all kinds will be prevented from significant access to the Pacific Ocean. The Chinese (and Russian) Pacific fleets will almost certainly be enclosed in their coastal waters.

This is because the First Island Chain running parallel to the mainland from Sakhalin Island in the north down through Japan, the Ryukyu islands, Taiwan, and on to the Philippine Islands and Indonesia, is a natural barrier now being fortified by the Japanese and Taiwanese militaries and the US Marines. The Commander of the US Marine Corps, General David Berger, recently announced that the Marines were changing their policies and missions in reaction to developments in Asia. He said a “new mission” for the Marines would be “island hopping” in the Indo-Pacific armed with anti-ship missiles to meet the growing China threat. (see The Times, London dispatch, Weekend Australian 6-7/11/21). Presumably, they would carry Tomahawk anti-ship missiles and be supported by US specifically designed shallow-hulled coastal patrol vessels, armed with the same Tomahawks, as well as Japanese submarines.

This would make transit through the Chain almost impossible for hostile surface ships and submarines. One of the difficulties for Chinese and Russian submarines is the difference between the relatively shallow waters of the seas between mainland China and the First Island Chain and the vast depths and trenches of the Pacific Ocean east of the Chain. Submarines would have to surface or near surface to transit the Chain either way, making them easily detectable and vulnerable.

Furthermore, at the southern end of the Chain, other US forces along with the navies of Australia, France, Britain and hopefully India and Indonesia could block Chinese and Russian naval and merchant shipping transiting the Malacca Strait and contiguous Indonesian waterways and passages. As a result, China could suffer a serious trade blockade.

As I argued in an earlier article in Quadrant (April 2021), Taiwan is a key link in the First Island Chain and its conquest by China would constitute an existential threat to Japan. Over many decades Japan has sought to preserve and strengthen the Chain as a protective instrument. If China took control of Taiwan it would gain access to the North Pacific and be able to surround Japan, which is a nation lacking geographical strategic depth. A China attack on Taiwan would lead to a Third Sino-Japanese War and the US would be obliged to support Japan (and therefore Taiwan) under the US-Japan Mutual Defense and Security Treaty. China’s recent threats to Taiwan have led to Japan announcing it would double its defence expenditure and invest heavily in new technology including robots and drones. Twenty years ago, China openly and seriously threatened Taiwan and, as a result, Japan immediately intensified its pressure on the US, imploring it to provide ABM (anti-ballistic missile) protection against China with the latest in US technology. The result was the 2004 US-Japan ABM Agreement which presumably also covered Taiwan (see below).

While many of us were discussing the possibilities of the “looming war over Taiwan”, the AUKUS agreement was announced on September 16, 2021. The major aspect of this agreement was the decision by the US, the UK and Australia to build at least eight nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs) for Australia. Initially, nothing much else was mentioned, at least not in the press.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden: Too Demented to Be Found Guilty of Crimes But not too demented to be president? by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on February 13th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-too-demented-to-be-found-guilty-of-crimes/

Special Counsel Robert Hur just found Joe Biden was guilty of violating national security laws in removing classified documents— after examining then Senator and Vice President Biden’s some 15-year habit of removing classified files to his offices and residences, where they were stored in unsecured fashion.

Period. End of story.

Hur then, as a disinterested Special Counsel, not a local county prosecutor on a limited budget, logically would have indicted and prosecuted Biden. It really is a jury’s decision to determine whether Biden was guilty or innocent, or whether he is pardoned/exempted by reason of dementia.

It is not the role of Hur, as a prosecutor and advocate for the state, to imagine how difficult his case might be to prove someone so incapacitated like Biden was guilty, as Hur’s own research and investigations had otherwise indicated that he was.

Is mindset, intention, or mental status a normal consideration of violations of national security laws, or is it the act itself? So we are back to the James Comey defense:

Hillary was guilty but in Lord and Savior Comey’s judgement no jury would likely convict a presidential candidate of such stature of violating national security laws. (After her reprieve, Hillary immediately claimed such extenuating circumstances were proof of her innocence. And Biden in a nanosecond likewise claimed he is now exonerated too, as was the administration’s plan all along).

Finally note the following:

1) The Left, Hur, and others believe that someone who has lost his faculties and who would not be allowed to drive a semi-truck, teach a class, diagnose a patient, argue a case, wire a house, or cook a hamburger is nevertheless fit enough to run the United States of America.