Congressional address reinforces US support for Israel, Netanyahu’s position as leading statesman Alex Traiman

https://www.jns.org/congressional-address-reinforces-us-support-for-israel-netanyahus-position-as-leading-statesman/?

Amid a disturbing leadership vacuum in the United States and international institutions, moral leadership from the Jewish state is as critical as ever.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress for the fourth time on Wednesday, one more than any other foreign dignitary, surpassing the record of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Netanyahu has reached this milestone for several reasons.

First, it’s due to the importance and strength of the alliance of two of the world’s most consequential democracies in the last 200 years. Second, such a distinction requires the longevity of a leader that has remained in power through the tenures of multiple American presidents. And lastly, a leader would not be invited to return time after time, unless that leader was an exceptional orator and statesman.

Enter Netanyahu.

He arrived amid unprecedented political chaos in the United States, days after President Joe Biden suddenly announced that he would no longer seek re-election and just two weeks after former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt.

He also arrived during an unprecedented crisis in Israel, nine months after the horrific Oct. 7 massacre and an ensuing regional war the Jewish state has been fighting on seven fronts. As the conflict has raged on—and even as Israel has gone to extraordinary efforts in urban warfare to reduce civilian casualties to the barest of minimums—mainstream media and international institutions have attempted to delegitimize Israel and undermine American support for Israel, particularly among liberals with libelous claims of war crimes and genocide.

Joe Biden delivers his own eulogy A short speech that said little and never explained why he withdrew Charles Lipson

https://thespectator.com/politics/joe-biden-delivers-own-eulogy-white-house-address/

Joe Biden delivered a eulogy for his presidency and his political career from the Oval Office Wednesday evening. It was a sad, sluggish ending to a life in politics, decades in the Senate, two terms as vice president, and finally a single term as president.  

President Biden needed to accomplish three things in the speech: 

Explain why he decided to withdraw from the race after months of insisting he would stay in and after receiving 14 million primary votes; 
Convince the country that he is still fit to serve the remaining months of his term; and 
Promote the candidacy of his replacement atop the Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris

He certainly promoted Harris and indirectly attacked Donald Trump, effectively calling him a threat to democracy. But he did nothing to explain why he withdrew from the race and nothing to convince a worried country that he was still fit to serve as president. 

He didn’t even try to explain why he withdrew. He simply quoted John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech that it “was time to pass the torch a new generation.” But quoting JFK doesn’t explain why Joe suddenly reached that epiphany last weekend, rather than a year ago, before he chose to run and cleared the field of other Democratic candidates. What changed? Biden’s speech evaded the question. 

There are lots of plausible answers. It might have been his catastrophic debate performance, which convinced many Americans that he no longer had the cognitive capacity to lead the country. It might have been his dismal poll numbers, the lowest of any president since modern polling began (even before the debate performance). It might have been polling in swing states, which showed he was unlikely to win the electoral votes he needs. It might have been the intense pressure from elected Democrats and unhappy donors, some of it in public, much of it behind closed doors.  

The best reporting says Biden didn’t jump, he was pushed. He was ousted in a back-room coup, led by Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

Beware: Kamala Harris Would Be Most Far-Left President In History

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/25/voters-beware-kamala-harris-would-be-most-far-left-president-in-history-if-you-elect-her/

That didn’t take long, did it? Already our friends in the mainstream media and the Democratic Party’s ever-ready spin-doctors are telling American voters that presumed presidential candidate Kamala Harris is not the extremist she’s portrayed to be by the wicked right-wingers. And they’re right. She’s worse.

There’s nary a policy area that Harris has come into contact with, either while in the White House, as a member of the Senate, or in California state government in which she hasn’t taken a position on the far-extreme of the spectrum — whether it’s immigration, medical care and insurance, foreign policy, abortion, whatever.

She’s almost always reliably on one side of the argument: The far-left side.

Don’t believe it? A 2019 survey by GovTrack, a non-partisan group, rated Harris as the person with the most far-left voting record in the Senate, even beating socialist firebrand Sen. Bernie Sanders for the honor. Perhaps, not by coincidence, that was the same year she began and ended her campaign for the presidency, lacking both voter and financial support.

Here are just a few of Harris’ hard-left positions on issues of vital importance, to give you an idea just how far sinistral side she is. You might want to remember this when the media inevitably start touting her as a “moderate” or even “conservative” on issues. She’s neither:

When Putsch Comes to Shove Roger Franklin Editor, Quadrant Online

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/07/when-putsch-comes-to-shove/

Scrawled on the mailbox outside the apartment I’m subletting in Manhattan is the message ‘Fuck Trump’. You expect that sort of thing, I suppose, in this often vulgar and always blue city, where any 12 names from the phone book will convict a Republican in a New York minute. About 500-odd miles to the west, in the yard of a heavy machinery dealer beside an Interstate near the West Virginia border, there is a monster flag on a very tall pole with the white-on-navy message ‘Fuck Biden’. One imagines it has now been brought down, just as Biden himself has been brought down, and that in some distant Chinese sweatshop the first rush orders are arriving for ‘Fuck Kamala’ banners.

In America’s legacy newsrooms, there has been no need for such prompts or instructions to begin stoking, as Joni Mitchell put it, “the star-maker machinery of the popular song”. And boy, was the media choir quick to get on-song with their hymns to Her. Behold Kamala, not the cackling klutz you might think you remember but a newly sainted smasher of glass ceilings, a strong woman  overlooked and underappreciated for too long. This has been quite the somersault. The same field hacks and big house pundits who just four weeks ago decried any coverage and all footage of doddering Joe as “cheap fakes” have performed contortions that would daunt the India Rubber Man.

The shamelessness is breath-taking and recourse to salty exclamation at the chutzpah of it all almost unavoidable. Today, the woman it appears Jill Biden picked to lead the secret Service was being grilled on Capitol Hill about the attempt on Donald Trump’s life and it didn’t go well for her. Mind you, this is one failure that can’t be laid at the for-the-moment president’s feet as it certainly wasn’t Old Joe who selected Kimberly Cheatle. Asked just before he came down with Covid (reportedly, if you believe it) if the Secret Service director should resign, he expressed confidence in “him”. In that same interview he also forgot the name of his Defence Secretary, calling him “you know, the black man”. That he might not recall Lloyd Bentsen isn’t terribly surprising as eight months have passed since the last White House cabinet meeting. Yes, eight months. One might object to the way Biden was ousted by the big-dollar donors and Democrat silverbacks whose actions say they value fourteen million primary voters not at all, but there can be no argument the man being thrown on the scrap heap is nowhere near fit to serve nor has been for quite some time.

Call for End to Israel Aid Is More Proof Organized Labor Is Progressivism and Progressivism Is Organized Labor Dominic Pino

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/call-for-end-to-israel-aid-is-more-proof-organized-labor-is-progressivism-and-progressivism-is-organized-labor/

Seven major U.S. labor unions have issued a joint letter urging President Biden to immediately stop all military aid to Israel. “Mr. President, the time to act decisively to end this war is now. Stopping U.S. military aid to Israel is the quickest and most sure way to do so, it is what U.S. law demands, and it will show your commitment to securing a lasting peace in the region,” the letter reads.

The Association of Flight Attendants, the American Postal Workers Union, the International Union of Painters, the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union, the United Auto Workers, and the United Electrical Workers all signed the letter.

The war in Gaza is probably not top of mind for flight attendants, mailmen, painters, teachers, janitors, auto workers, and electricians. But it is top of mind for their labor unions, because those unions are appendages of the progressive movement.

The UAW called for a cease-fire in Gaza in December of last year, with some UAW locals calling for one mere days after the Hamas attack on October 7. The UAW, in particular, has a large contingent of higher-education workers in its ranks, with college campuses being hotbeds of anti-Israel activism. The UAW represents about the same number of workers at the University of California system as it does at General Motors.

The UAW Arab Caucus, which also supports the BDS movement, called for the union to change its stance from calling for a cease-fire only to also calling for a halt to all U.S. military aid back in February.

Creating the Cult of Kamala Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/creating-the-cult-of-kamala/

Whether it’s a product of motivated reasoning or wishful thinking, the race is on to make America’s famously maladroit vice president into a cultural sensation.

If there was going to be an upside to Joe Biden’s presidency, its earliest days suggested it might be found in the lack of a cult of personality around the man. The president inspired support and opposition in Americans but not abject devotion. He was a functionary – a flawed and fallible bureaucrat – and it would be healthy for the country to revert to the mean after twelve consecutive years in which the president was regarded by his supporters as the personification of the national will. That experiment ended in failure.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Biden years proved that presidents who are not ballasted by celebrity worship sink into the abyss. The president’s camp conceded as much with its bewildering campaign to popularize “dark Brandon” – a vaguely menacing figure with lasers for eyes and a conspicuous appetite for ice cream, who, as Politico put it, is also “a master of the political dark arts.”  The artifice was a bad fit for Biden, but the enterprise acknowledged a lamentable truth: In the absence of a pop mythology and the thoughtless adulation that accompanies it, the president will be evaluated on his or her performance alone. In a polarized era typified by broad and sustained dissatisfaction with the status quo, that would be a heavy lift even for an accomplished chief executive. For the middling sort, it’s the kiss of death.

A New Polish Star A blunt, brilliant debut speech in Brussels shows that Poland isn’t yet entirely lost to the Left. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-new-polish-star/

Not all that long ago, Spain and Ireland and Poland were seriously Catholic countries, famous for cultures that – in comparison with most of Western Europe – seemed downright old-fashioned, and famous, too, for the severity of their laws on matters like divorce and abortion. No more. In the post-Franco era, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) has held the reins of power in Madrid longer than any other, and Spanish culture has changed accordingly. During the same period, Ireland has undergone a no less dramatic transformation.

Poland’s big political metamorphosis has happened more recently. When I visited Warsaw a few years ago, it was conservative, pristine, obviously proud of its history and heritage. I’ve been to a lot of cities in Western Europe, but, for reasons I probably need not expatiate upon, none felt as safe as Warsaw. Like most other Eastern European countries, Poland belonged to the EU but was fiercely skeptical about its leaders’ globalist agenda, their attempt to turn duly elected national governments into mere puppets, and their determination to fill Europe with Muslims who despise Western values.

Perhaps above all, I was impressed – and touched – by the Poles’ staunch pro-Americanism: unlike some Europeans, the Poles, who have always had the exceedingly bad luck of being located between Germany and Russia, those two chronically aggressive powers, and who spent much of the twentieth century under the brutal heel of Nazism and Communism, have never fallen for the widely promoted delusion that it is the EU, and not NATO – with America at its head – that keeps them safe from the threat of Russian predation.

Liz Peek: Brace yourself, America. With Kamala Harris, Democrats are about to put on an incredible show

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/brace-yourself-america-kamala-harris-democrats-about-put-incredible-show

Heads up America: Democrats are as phony as they are dishonest. All those accolades pouring in about Joe Biden being an “historic” president and a “great public servant”? Phony. Even before his catastrophic debate Biden’s approval ratings were in the gutter. 

Gushing over candidate Kamala Harris? Also phony. Democrats have been hand-wringing for months about how they could eject President Biden but not allow the unpopular V.P. to take his place. They are only coalescing around her now because they are panicked that an open selection process would throw their party into total disarray.

Kamala Harris has been one of Joe Biden’s most stalwart defenders, lying brazenly for months about his fitness to serve as president for another four years.  

As his vice president, Harris has played a pivotal role in perpetrating one of the greatest political deceptions ever, a deception that has undermined confidence in our political system and put our country at risk. For this alone, she is disqualified from ever serving as this nation’s commander-in-chief. 

Still, Republicans need to steel themselves: Democrats are about to put on an incredible show. No, I don’t mean the Democratic Convention in Chicago, which starts on August 19. I mean the tidal wave of money and faux enthusiasm which is about to flow into the campaign to elect Kamala Harris. Democrats everywhere will inundate the airwaves with excited testimonials about Harris’ candidacy; MSNBC hosts will be positively giddy. 

Our Elections Are More Vulnerable Than Ever By Brian T. Kennedy

https://tomklingenstein.com/our-elections-are-more-vulnerable-than-ever/

At no time during the Cold War with the Soviet Union was it imagined that the Russians could manipulate a United States presidential election in favor of their preferred candidate. Hollywood’s portrayal of a “Manchurian Candidate” aside, American elections were held in person, using paper ballots, counted by human beings, with other human beings watching them. And, however vicious and corrupt the normal partisan interplay of American politics may have been, this practice insured that a fair enough election could be held. Today that is no longer the case.

Regardless of who the nominees are in 2024, just as in 2020, much of America will hold their elections in the least transparent, most vulnerable method possible: absentee ballots. Because of this, a free and fair election cannot be assured. It matters not that President Trump is ahead in all the polls and in ways that some pollsters believe cannot be overcome. Citizens should expect that, since America is in a war with Communist China, November’s election will be the target of a massive intelligence operation to decide the next president.

It should be noted that America’s election system was not built to stop the Communist Chinese or any nation state, or for that matter any dark money group, with the capacity and the interest in deciding an American presidential election.

The United States is made vulnerable by being the only developed country in the world to allow for this wide-spread use of absentee ballots. Every other advanced democracy conducts their elections in person, with identification shown, on paper ballots counted by large groups of people transparently tallying vote totals with the results available the same day of the election. In states around America, Secretaries of State have allowed or been part of the development of elections systems that would appear to be designed to allow for fraud. So whether or not an election is stolen, a free and fair election system has been stolen from the American people. Today we have systems that lack transparency, whether it is the absentee ballot process or the electronic voting systems. That it can be exploited by the Chinese Communist Party should seem obvious.

The Trump Transformation Turning the Republican Party into winners. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-trump-transformation/

Remember in October of 2008, when Barack Obama boasted, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America” into an even bigger and more intrusive big government nanny state? That prediction was on its way to being confirmed by Obama’s two terms and his policies both at home and abroad, from the expansion of illiberal identity politics, racial divisiveness, and tax-and-spend economics here; to an appeasing, self-loathing, serially cringing apologies overseas. His handpicked successor, Hillary Clinton, was poised to take over the project and lead it to its completion.

Then the unthinkable happened––Donald Trump. At first, he was a novelty act, too crass and déclassé for the bipartisan political guild to believe he could displace the five more conventional Republicans in the primaries. He lacked the credentials typical of postwar presidents––election to state or federal office, a degree from a tony law school, and experience as a lawyer.

In addition to being tainted by commerce, his business ventures were infra dig for the political establishment––beauty pageants, professional wrestling, real estate development, and a successful reality television show The Apprentice, with its insensitive catch-phrase “You’re fired!” For cognitive elites who fancy themselves culturally literate, his book, The Art of the Deal, reeked of hucksterism and profit-grubbing. Worst of all, his take-no-prisoners, blunt, often brutal, hyperbolic speaking style was more suited for a biker bar than the hallowed halls of government, and their decorous, elevated discourse redolent of a country club soirée.

But Donald Trump’s biggest sin was winning the presidency, which discombobulated the pundits, experts, consultants, and political guildsmen. His scorn for their haughty “norms” and fossilized received wisdom was unforgivable, and his patriotic populism was an ominous sign of incipient fascism, since every well-bred globalist technocrat knew that nationalism is the gateway drug to racism, xenophobia, and ultimately Hitlerian tyranny.

That his first term was successful on every level, with economic growth at home, and peace abroad, didn’t matter to the bipartisan Trumpophobes. He just wasn’t one of them, and made his disdain for their missish rules and gate-keeping “norms” crudely obvious. For the political establishment, he had to go “by any means necessary.”