NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The foreign policy amateur Peter Van Buren So far Biden has alienated allies and layered on the bureaucracy — what next?

Posted By on September 23rd, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/joe-biden-foreign-policy-amateur/

Since Joe Biden was elected in part as a salve for Donald Trump’s perceived foreign policy blunders, it seems reasonable nine months in to go searching for the Biden Doctrine, to assess his initial foreign policy moves, to see what paths he has sketched out for the next three years.

…is that a tumbleweed?

Well, OK, there was Afghanistan, Biden’s most significant foreign policy action. Biden won election in November and took office in January. There was ample time for replanning and renegotiating anything that had been left behind by Trump, especially since Biden and his team had muddled in Afghanistan during the Obama era and knew well the mess they’d helped create.

The rush for the last plane out was a fully expected unexpected event. Yet the Biden administration did not quietly start the evacuation in February with high-value personnel, nor did it negotiate ahead of time the third country landing rights it knew would be needed. Mistakes made in Vietnam evacuating locals who worked with us were clear, yet Biden did not kick start processing SIV visas until literally the last flights were scheduled out of Afghanistan. The entire evacuation appeared as an unplanned free fall, just ‘land some planes and see if that works’.

Biden placed the fate of the evacuation, all those lives, in the hands of the Taliban, depending on them to uphold agreements, provide security, vet Americans en route to the airport, and generally play nice to save face as the door hit us in the ass on the way out. While the National Security Council spokeswoman called the Taliban ‘businesslike and professional’, Biden played like a rube. Even assuming good intentions (!), the Taliban are loosely organized, with plenty of local warlords and Isis spinoffs to ensure things can go wrong — like the terror bombing that killed 13 Americans and basically ended the evacuation.

Biden’s follow-up? Lie about the success of a revenge drone strike to make sure America’s final official act was to kill civilians. That capped the most amateurish foreign policy execution seen in a long time. Mistakes? How about assuming your enemies share your goals, negotiating after you have lost and hold no cards, failing to plan for anticipated events and then blaming your predecessor? For a foreign diplomat sitting in London, Tokyo, Beijing or Paris, the question had to have been ‘who if anyone is in charge in Washington?’

Biden’s other foreign policy gesture, the recent submarine agreement with Australia which alienated the French, raises the same question.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Russiagate Became a Story of Old Friends in High Places Eric Felten

Posted By on September 23rd, 2021

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/09/22/how_russiagate_became_a_story_of_old_friends_indeed_795476.html

The indictment of Washington attorney Michael Sussman — accused of lying to the FBI in order to smear Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign — reveals the ace up the sleeve of high-powered Democrats. It’s a card they played time and again to advance the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory: friends in high places.

They used friends in law enforcement to launch secret investigations; they used friends in the federal government to broaden those investigations; and they used friends in the media to spread the word about Trump and his organization being under investigation.

Michael Sussmann: Securing a meeting with the FBI’s top lawyer can’t have been easy, but for him it was.

CSPAN

James Baker of the FBI: Sussmann came to him “based on a preexisting relationship.”

RCP

The Russia fiasco metastasized in large part because those involved in advancing the false allegations had important connections. They used friendships with powerful federal officials to encourage investigations against team Trump. Those targeted by Sussmann and others were unabashed outsiders, and as such lacked the sort of connections the insiders exploited so adroitly.

Sussmann was a partner at the Washington law firm Perkins Coie in 2016, which represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. But, according to the indictment handed down by Special Counsel John Durham last week, when he met with the FBI’s general counsel, James Baker, to allege that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians, Sussmann claimed he was representing another client. The indictment alleges this was false.

Securing a meeting with the FBI’s top lawyer can’t have been easy. But for Sussmann it was.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tom Cotton: The World ‘Laughs’ At Biden After Weak UN Address Reagan McCarthy

Posted By on September 23rd, 2021

President Joe Biden’s address to the United Nations on Tuesday drew criticism from Republicans for failing to adequately address adversaries, including Russia and China. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) slammed Biden for failing to identify China as an enemy, and warned that the world sees the commander-in-chief as laughable.

“I think a lot of the world sees Joe Biden and just laughs at the statements he made yesterday. You just mentioned or played a clip there, he said we don’t seek a new Cold War. Well, of course we don’t seek a new Cold War. We would rather have peace with all nations. But when China is waging a Cold War against the United States, we don’t have a choice whether we’re in it or not. We only have a choice to win or to lose. But beyond that, he didn’t even mention China’s name,” Cotton said during an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday. “It’s like he was scared to mention China’s name. Now, I know the White House is doing damage control today, saying that was by design. Let me give you a contrast. In 2014, after Russia invaded Crimea, Barack Obama, who’s no one’s idea of a chest-beating American nationalist, used Russia’s name more than 10 times in his United Nations speech. So I think Xi Jinping and China’s communist leaders in Beijing are laughing today at Joe Biden. And that’s a dangerous thing for China not to take the American president seriously.”

Rather than confronting adversaries, Biden spent much of his speech addressing climate change.

 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

New York’s Superstar Progressive Isn’t A.O.C. By Bret Stephens

Posted By on September 23rd, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/opinion/Ritchie-Torres-AOC.html

Ritchie Torres, a congressman from America’s poorest district — New York’s 15th, in the Bronx — quietly bristles at the A.O.C. comparison.

“There’s a sense in which the media narrative diminishes me,” he tells me over plates of pasta at a restaurant in the Bronx’s Little Italy when I raise the subject of his notorious fellow Democrat from an adjoining district, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I resist the temptation to fit into a preconceived narrative. My career in politics long predates the Squad.”

No need to explain who and what is meant by the Squad — the House members seen by some as the bright dawning of a new Democratic Party and by others as the Four Horsewomen of the Wokepocalypse. Not long after our lunch, A.O.C. once again became Topic A of national conversation for posturing politically while posing pictorially at the Met Gala.

The bigger mystery is why Torres (who was emphatically not at the gala) hasn’t yet become a household name in the United States. On the identity-and-background scorecard, he checks every progressive box. Afro-Latino, the son of a single mom who raised three children working as a mechanic’s assistant on a minimum-wage salary of $4.25 an hour, a product of public housing and public schools, a half brother of two former prison inmates, an N.Y.U. dropout, the Bronx’s first openly gay elected official when he won a seat on the City Council in 2013 at the age of 25 and the victor over a gay-bashing Christian minister when he won his House seat last year.

He’s dazzlingly smart. He sees himself “on a mission to radically reduce racially concentrated poverty in the Bronx and elsewhere in America.”

In other words, Torres is everything a modern-day progressive is supposed to look and be like, except in one respect: Unlike so much of the modern left (including A.O.C., who grew up as an architect’s daughter in the middle-class Westchester town of Yorktown Heights), he really is a child of the working class. He understands what working-class people want, as opposed to what so many of its self-appointed champions claim they want.

HISTORY Comments turned off

How Pre-Prohibition Drinking Laws Led New Yorkers to Create the World’s Worst Sandwich It was everywhere at the turn of the 20th century. It was also inedible. Darrell Hartman

Posted By on September 22nd, 2021

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/to-evade-pre-prohibition-drinking-laws-new-yor

Read when you’ve got time to spare.

Near the end of the 19th century, New Yorkers out for a drink partook in one of the more unusual rituals in the annals of hospitality. When they ordered an ale or whisky, the waiter or bartender would bring it out with a sandwich. Generally speaking, the sandwich was not edible. It was “an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese,” wrote the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Other times it was made of rubber. Bar staff would commonly take the sandwich back seconds after it had arrived, pair it with the next beverage order, and whisk it over to another patron’s table. Some sandwiches were kept in circulation for a week or more.

Bar owners insisted on this bizarre charade to avoiding breaking the law—specifically, the excise law of 1896, which restricted how and when drinks could be served in New York State. The so-called Raines Law was a combination of good intentions, unstated prejudices, and unforeseen consequences, among them the comically unsavory Raines sandwich.

The new law did not come out of nowhere. Republican reformers, many of them based far upstate in Albany, had been trying for years to curb public drunkenness. They were also frustrated about New York City’s lax enforcement of so-called Sabbath laws, which included a ban on Sunday boozing. New York Republicans spoke for a constituency largely comprised of rural and small-town churchgoers. But the party had also gained a foothold in Democratic New York City, where a 37-year-old firebrand named Theodore Roosevelt had been pushing a law-and-order agenda as president of the city’s newly organized police commission. Roosevelt, a supporter of the Raines Law, predicted that it would “solve whatever remained of the problem of Sunday closing.”

In his crackdown on vice in New York, Theodore Roosevelt supported the Raines Law.

New York City at the time was home to some 8,000 saloons. The seediest among them were “dimly lit, foul-smelling, rickety-chaired, stale-beer dives” that catered to “vagrants, shipless sailors, incompetent thieves, [and] aging streetwalkers,” Richard Zacks writes in Island of Vice, his book-length account of Roosevelt’s reform campaign.

The 1896 Raines Law was designed to put dreary watering holes like these out of business. It raised the cost of an annual liquor license to $800, three times what it had cost before and a tenfold increase for beer-only taverns.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Follow the (Political) Science The Biden administration’s attempt to extend vaccine booster shots to all adults contradicts its pledge to listen to experts at the CDC and FDA. Joel Zinberg

Posted By on September 22nd, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/bidens-politicized-vaccine-booster-plan

Both before and after the 2020 election, Joe Biden complained that President Donald Trump had politicized the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden insisted that he, in contrast with Trump, would “follow the science” and listen to the experts at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. And yet, President Biden has pushed vaccine booster shots for all adults despite opposition from the very agencies he touted as sentinels of science. Now an outside advisory panel to the FDA has overwhelmingly rejected the Biden plan, opting to recommend boosters only for a high-risk subset of those who have received the vaccine.

The administration announced plans for vaccine boosters beginning September 20 before any vaccine maker had even applied for booster approval. The first application, and thus far the only completed application ready for consideration, came from Pfizer on August 25, one week after the booster announcement. It seeks booster authorization for ages 16 and up. Pfizer’s supporting evidence was thin. Its application reported increased immune responses to the original viral variant following boosters in 317 subjects aged 18 to 55 and 12 subjects ages 65 to 85. Evidence on activity against the Delta variant that currently predominates was limited to just 11 subjects aged 18 to 55 and 12 subjects aged 65 to 85. No increase in severe adverse events related to boosters was found in the 329 subjects. Pfizer extrapolated safety and effectiveness for 16-17-year-olds from the adult data even though young males have the highest risk of heart inflammation (pericarditis/myocarditis) reported after initial vaccinations.

Politico reports that several CDC officials disagreed with the Biden administration’s booster plans, announced in mid-August. Many felt that the timetable was too rushed to allow the agency to complete studies and review vaccine manufacturer data that would justify the shots before the September 20 start date.

Two top FDA vaccine regulators, Marion Gruber and Philip Krause, announced their retirements shortly after the announcement in a move that many interpreted as a protest against the plan. Both joined with 16 other authors in a recently published Lancet article that concludes the booster policy is not supported by current evidence. They argue that vaccine efficacy remains high and that the unvaccinated remain the major drivers of transmission. Going ahead with boosters now, before adequate data and analysis are available, risks vaccine side effects that could undermine confidence in vaccines and undercut efforts to increase primary vaccinations. Moreover, they suggest that new vaccines, crafted against currently circulating variants, would likely be better boosters than administering additional doses of the original.

Other reports suggest widespread dissatisfaction among FDA staff and outside vaccine advisers who feel that White House political officials steered the announcement and cut key, career FDA employees out of the decision-making. Members of the CDC’s independent vaccine-advisory panel— the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—voiced frustration that the administration announced a plan before scientists had an opportunity to review the data and approve boosters.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who is Controlling the Biden Presidency? by Chris Farrell

Posted By on September 22nd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17762/controlling-biden-presidency

To answer the question of who is controlling the Biden presidency, we should consider the Biden administration’s disastrous policy decisions. “Cui bono?” – Who benefits?

Why would Biden abandon Bagram Air Force Base? It is key to all of Southwest Asia – just 400 miles to China and 500 miles to Iran. It is a vitally important geopolitical, military and intelligence platform with consequences and “reach” that involve far more than just Afghan regional matters. Who, specifically, made the recommendation to just walk away from Bagram – and then who gave the order?

If we suggest that there is a combination or passing alliance of these various interests and groups, each seeking to advance their own agenda behind the official, hollow, front of “President Joe Biden” – then we run the risk of being branded conspiracy theorists. That is both dishonest and unfortunate, because asking questions of, and seeking accountability from, elected officials is not “crazy.” Interest groups do, in fact, lobby presidential advisors, White House staff, and even members of the president’s family.

We must press on – asking questions, examining records, seeking accountability and documenting facts. The truth will prevail.

The question has been asked dozens of different ways, depending on the questioner and the public policy issue. “Who is controlling the Biden presidency?”

One thing appears certain: It is not President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. He gives incoherent, rambling speeches, and often declines to take questions.

A May 2021 powder-puff profile of President Biden in the Washington Post was written as both a hagiography and a politically therapeutic assurance that there’s been a “return to normalcy” in the White House. The article’s author, Ashley Parker, was clearly given extraordinary access to personal details by White House staff and Biden handlers in order to compose her report. The resulting article is an interesting mix of Ms. Parker taking careful dictation from the White House, and her own ambition to pledge allegiance to the larger Biden “family.” In fairness, here is how Ms. Parker describes the sourcing of her article:

“This account of Biden’s daily schedule is based on interviews with seven people familiar with the president’s daily life, most speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose private details.”

There is genuine journalistic value in Ms. Parker’s work – and a mere four (+) months later – given the lightning fast and tumultuous downturn in the Biden presidency, 20/20 hindsight and review of her article may help answer our question: “Who is controlling the Biden presidency?”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ivy League Detention Centers The cultural illiteracy of this class is of a piece with the moral illiteracy of the jury responsible for this class. To our armories of liberty, students and jurors shrug. By Bill Asher

Posted By on September 22nd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/21/ivy-league-detention-centers/

When a 10 percent transmission rate is 150 percent higher than a college or university’s rate of admission, when it is improbable that adults will contract COVID-19 from teens but almost impossible for teens to avoid rejection from the adults (so-called) in the room—the adults who decide whom shall enter the classrooms at Harvard or Princeton or Columbia—the life of the mind is dead. 

Or, in the spirit of and to paraphrase William F. Buckley, I would rather be judged by the first 40 people in a jury pool than by the 40 people who judge applicants to Harvard College.

I would rather be a defendant in a criminal trial, free to have my lawyer examine prospective jurors, than submit my fate to a jury whose biases are no secret and whose deliberations are a sham. 

I question this jury’s ability to deliberate, except to say the jury’s silence is deliberate: that its results lack evidence, that record-low acceptance rates do not prove an incoming class is the most learned and literate and civic-minded class in the history of Harvard or Princeton or Columbia; that this class has no class, that it is a monoculture more discriminatory than the finals clubs or eating clubs of the past, proud of its hatred and unwilling to study or emulate the best of the past.

To know the consciousness of this class is to understand the power of false consciousness.

What this class fails to convince others to believe is that all other classes are unfit to lead and are too unintelligent to learn. What this class believes about itself is that it has a mandate to rule, based not on the consent of the governed, but according to the consensus of those who demand to govern everything.

This belief, the belief that a so-called meritocracy is meritorious, is a threat to freedom and democracy.

What, after all, do meritocrats know about democracy in America, or democracy, or America?

The question is rhetorical, while questions abound about this class’s fluency in the rhetoric of Americanism. That this class is not conversant in the language of Adams or Jefferson is no surprise. That this class is ignorant of the lyricism of Lincoln and deaf to the mystic chords of memory is no accident.

The cultural illiteracy of this class is of a piece with the moral illiteracy of the jury responsible for this class. 

The two are illiterate in a tangible way, for they do not revere that which they do not know to respect. 

They see places to study, not paradises to behold, for they do not admire the architecture or honor the names engraved in stone, never stopping to hold America in their hands, never reading the works of great men or walking in humility toward works of greatness, never looking to the lights inside the Memorial Rooms of Harvard’s Widener Library or the New Lights of Princeton’s Firestone Library or at the words in lights outside Columbia’s Low Memorial Library.

To these armories of liberty, students and jurors shrug.

Because of these students and jurors, a nation weeps.

EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Conspiratorial Anti-Zionism Professor David Miller and the paranoid style of politics. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on September 22nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/conspiratorial-anti-zionism-richard-l-cravatts/

“Anti-Semitism,” wrote Stephen Eric Bronner, author of the engaging book A Rumor About The Jews, “is the stupid answer to a serious question: How does history operate behind our backs?” For a wide range of ideological extremists, anti-Semitism is still the stupid answer for why what goes wrong with the world does go wrong. It is a philosophical world view and interpretation of history that creates conspiracies as a way of explaining the unfolding of historical events; it is a pessimistic and frantic outlook, characterized in 1964 by historian Richard Hofstadter as “the paranoid style” of politics, which shifts responsibility from the self to sinister, omnipotent others—typically and historically the Jews.

Long the thought product of cranks and fringe groups, Hofstadter’s paranoid style of politics has lately entered the mainstream of what would be considered serious and respectable academic enterprise. Witness, for instance, the ongoing controversy engulfing Professor David Miller, professor of political sociology in the School for Policy Studies at Britain’s Bristol University, who has enraged Jewish students and other external stakeholders by his vicious attacks on Zionism, Israel, and Jewish organizations in England.

In his lectures, writing, and public statements Miller has vehemently suggested that Jewish communal organizations work in tandem, behind the scenes and in a furtive and underhanded manner, to subvert the interest of British universities and government. More than that, Miller also contends that Zionism itself, which he characterizes as a “fanatical” political ideology, has as one of its primary roles to slander Islam, that Zionism, he contends, is a chief source of Islamophobia. And the shady Jewish organizations he identifies as being part of the defense and promotion of Zionism are therefore agents of this bigotry, not to mention, as he put it, that “the Zionist movement and the Israeli government are the enemy of the left, the enemy of world peace.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Greta’s Chumps Climate zeal decides an election in Norway. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on September 22nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/gretas-chumps-bruce-bawer/

The main thing you need to know about the results of last week’s Norwegian elections is that the international media and political elites were absolutely thrilled – just like when Joe Biden won. “America is back!” they cheered in the world’s corridors of power last November. Similar sentiments greeted the news that Norway’s left-wing parties had secured a majority of parliamentary seats, ousting the conservatives.

In a time when China and Russia are saber-rattling, when the COVID lockdown has decimated economies, and when the dire process of Islamization continues in Europe, the top issue in the Norwegian election was – what else? – climate change. No surprise. The nation’s state-run media corporation – a reliable fount of leftist agitprop – has been pushing the existential-threat, time-is-running-out line for years. This time around, deluged with Greta Thunberg-style campaign rhetoric, a significant number of voters listened. Why? Partly because many Norwegians are highly susceptible to save-the-world pitches: this is, after all, the “peace nation,” which derives much of its sense of identity from brokering accords and being a founding member of the UN. But also partly because of the central role of nature in Norwegian culture.

You see, you’re not a true Norwegian unless you’re devoted to friluftsliv – life out in the open air. (The word was coined by Henrik Ibsen in 1859.) Taking walks in the mountains isn’t just a popular pastime but something more like a sacred ritual. The late Arne Næss, the country’s foremost modern philosopher (and, briefly, uncle-in-law of Diana Ross) built up his whole philosophy around the zen of mountain climbing, the importance of going outside and breathing fresh air, and the proposition that the rights of plants are equal to those of human beings. This intense attachment to nature makes Norwegians very eco-conscious, and gives them a fierce sense of custodianship of the natural world – and hence makes them the perfect suckers for the climate-change hustle.

Here’s just one example of Norwegians’ determination to do good by the environment: in no other country has a higher percentage of the population bought into the electric-car scam. Since 2016, the market share of plug-in vehicles has skyrocketed from 29.1% to 74.7%. As for those Luddites who still rely on fossil fuels, you might expect them to be charged reasonable prices at the pump, given that Norway’s biggest industry is the extraction of North Sea oil and gas. (After all, Venezuelans pay less than a penny per gallon – one of the few advantages of living in that hellhole.) But nope: owing to punitive taxes, Norwegian motorists pay the world’s second highest gasoline prices. And most accept their punishment uncomplainingly, like the repentant sinners they are.