RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/02/the-bidenomics-worked-sham-kicks-into-high-gear-for-2024/

Bidenomics boosters in the media and on Wall Street are everywhere to be seen these days, selling the election-year idea that our president’s economic policies have somehow triumphantly raised our economy Phoenix-like from the ashes. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A sampling of headlines going back to last summer show the adulation for Bidenomics among our supposedly objective economic cognoscenti (Latin for “know-it-alls”):

“Bidenomics Is Real Economics,” Time Magazine.

“Bidenomics is working,” New York Magazine.

And our over-the-top favorite: “Bidenomics’ critics are being proven wrong. Happy days are here again,” Fortune Magazine.

We could go on, but why bother? Popular pundits, media mavens and left-leaning economists are all selling you a bill of goods.

https://www.thefp.com/p/tracey-jacobson-afghan-allies-iraq-ambassador?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When America was retreating from its 20-year-war in Afghanistan in August 2021, Omar was one of the Afghan allies President Joe Biden promised to rescue. He had performed a perilous task for the U.S. military: identifying and neutralizing roadside mines embedded by the Taliban insurgency. 

Omar was supposed to receive a special immigrant visa, or SIV, which would have been his ticket to a new life in the U.S. now that his old life was in grave danger from the Taliban. 

He never got that SIV. Instead, after being stopped at a checkpoint last February, Taliban thugs dragged him from his home two days later and beat him to a pulp for helping the United States. His family found his unconscious body lying limp on the street. After four surgeries, Omar succumbed to his wounds and died that same month. (The Free Press is withholding Omar’s last name to protect his family) 

Nearly two years after Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, there are 150,000 Afghans like Omar who put their lives at risk to work with the U.S. government, but are still waiting for their SIVs. Though the SIV process was supposed to provide an escape route for our Afghan allies, that process was “chaos incarnate,” said Tom Kasza, the executive director of the 1208 Foundation, which helps former Afghan allies obtain their visas.

And yet the woman in charge of the SIV Taskforce during the fiasco is getting a promotion. Last week, the White House nominated Tracey Jacobson, 59, to be the next U.S. ambassador to Iraq. The last time Biden talked publicly about Jacobson was on August 14, 2021, the day before Kabul fell to the Taliban. The president said he was putting Jacobson “in charge of a whole-of-government effort to process, transport, and relocate Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicants and other Afghan allies.” 

America’s ambassador to Iraq is a crucial appointment now that the U.S. is engaged in a regional war with Iran and its proxies. Iran’s militias in Iraq, which draw their salaries from the government budget in Baghdad, have stepped up their attacks since Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel. One of those militias, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, claimed credit Sunday for a drone attack on a U.S. base in Jordan that killed three service members and wounded at least 34 more.

https://victorhanson.com/the-crazy-story-behind-the-disturbing-news-part-four/

When Hatred Is Mainstreamed: The Strange Case of Joy Reid (Continued)

3) Given Reid’s free pass to collectively stereotype groups, mostly all whites in general, why—in an era in which cultural appropriation is a common leftist charge in matters of dress and grooming (do we remember the dreadlocks scandal in which whites were blasted for emulating African-American hairstyles?)—would Reid die her hair white/blond?

Note that hair and race are irrelevant. They only become so, when one sees racial differences as essential to our personas rather than incidental, such as Joy Reid herself.

That is, Reid has a long history of claiming hairstyles represent revolutionary politics. In the past, she claimed she deliberately wears her hair in a way that exudes black authenticity and naturalness. For example, a 2020 Forbes article took note of her MSNBC appearance: “It’s why Reid decided her history making new show was an opportunity to be intentional with her choice of hairstyle. It was indeed a political statement. Actually, her choice was a revolutionary act.” 

Or as Reid put it of her “revolutionary act,” “I think that Black women have come into our own in every aspect, including in insisting that we will be ourselves, including in the way we wear our hair. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to embrace our hair as it is, or how we reimagine it, and it’s an affirmation of our full arrival as citizens and cultural leaders. And yes, our natural hair is a political statement.”

If “our natural hair is a political statement,” what then is now Reid’s assessment of her latest style when she wears whitish blond dyed hair, even as she writes off the entire state of Iowa as overrepresented clueless white people who blindly vote for the evil Donald Trump?

https://victorhanson.com/how-to-ensure-a-big-ugly-war-with-iran/

Iranian-backed militias have attacked American installations and forces in Syria, Iraq, and Jordan some 170 times.

Ostensibly, these terrorist groups claim they are hitting US forces to coerce America into dropping its support of Israel and demanding a cease-fire in the Gaza war.

In reality, these satellite terrorists are being directed in a larger effort by Iran to pry the US. out of the Middle East, in the manner of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing.

That way, Iran will be free to fulfill its old dream of becoming a nuclear shield for a new Shiite/Persian terrorist axis from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut to the West Bank and Gaza—surrounding Israel and intimidating the Gulf regimes and more moderate states like Jordan and Egypt into concessions.

These Iranian appendages have made a number of unfortunately correct assumptions about America in general and the Biden administration in particular.

One, after the recent serial humiliations of the flight from Afghanistan, the passivity of watching a Chinese spy balloon traverse with impunity the continental United States, the mixed American signals on the eve of the Ukraine war, the troubled Pentagon’s recruitment and leadership lapses, and the destruction of the US southern border, both Iran and its surrogates feel that the United States either cannot or will do much of anything in response to their aggression.

They see the U.S. military short thousands of recruits, its leadership politicized, its munition stocks depleted by arms shipments to Ukraine and Israel, and the massive abandonment of weapons in Kabul.