AP
Photo/Carolyn Kaster
20 Aug 2020 Washington, DC 1,427
4:41
President
Donald Trump told Breitbart News exclusively in the Oval Office last week that
his general election opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his entire
family are “corrupt.”
Trump, the incumbent Republican,
will face off against Democrat Biden in November. Biden, the presumptive
Democrat nominee, will formally accept the Democrat nomination for president,
thereby officially becoming the party’s presidential nominee at the Democrat
National Convention on Thursday night.
In his Oval Office interview with
Breitbart News last Monday, the president made clear that his opponent and his
whole family are “corrupt,” as evidenced by not just Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s
business dealings with the Chinese Communist Party and Ukrainian oligarchs, but
also other Biden family members, such as Biden’s brothers, James and Frank
Biden and more.
Trump
started by ripping into Hunter Biden for the $1.5 billion deal he cut with the
Chinese. Hunter Biden accompanied his father, then the sitting vice president,
to China on Air Force Two. Then just weeks later, he secured a $1.5 billion
deal from the Bank of China, as Peter Schweizer—Breitbart News senior
contributor and Government Accountability Institute president— has exposed . Hunter Biden also had a deal through Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian
natural gas company, through which he made tens of thousands of dollars a
month—even though he had never been to Ukraine before
accepting the position. Joe Biden, as vice president, pressured Ukraine to fire
a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma while his son Hunter worked for the
firm.
“Hunter Biden came away with $1.5
billion, of which he gets big fees on. It’s not a possible thing to do,” Trump
told Breitbart News in the Oval Office. “You can’t do that. It doesn’t—nobody
has done that. Nobody has done that. China doesn’t do that. But he walked away
in ten minutes with one-and-a-half-billion dollars. He gets fees on it.
Ukraine, the same thing.”
But Hunter
Biden’s questionable international dealings were not limited to China and
Ukraine. As Schweizer’s most recent book, Profiles in Corruption exposed , Hunter Biden’s firms had deals
that secured hundreds of millions of dollars in other deals with the Chinese
and with the Russians and Kazakhs as well.
“Other countries,” Trump said,
noting next that the whole Biden family has been in on the graft: “The same
thing for the family.”
Trump is
correct about that. Schweizer’s Profiles
in Corruption
Despite
having no experience whatsoever, Schweizer revealed this year that Frank was linked to $54
million in taxpayer loans from the Obama administration provided to help with
U.S. relations in the Caribbean. Schweizer also revealed that Biden’s other brother,
James, was employed at a firm to which the Obama administration funneled more
than $1.5 billion in contracts over the course of Biden’s time in the nation’s
second-highest office.
“It’s a corrupt family,” Trump told
Breitbart News of the Bidens. “It’s a corrupt family, okay?”
In addition
to Frank, James, and Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden
Owens, is exposed in Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption launched a firm from the Oval Office and
repeatedly briefed investors privately, as Schweizer exposed in the book.
The
president’s comments came in response to Breitbart News asking him about
Biden’s attempts to frame him as weak on China, something that is hard to argue
given the president’s and his administration’s work on the issue. Nonetheless,
Biden’s team has tried to flip the script against
Trump on China, something the president laughed at during his Oval Office
interview as he laid out his successes in holding the Chinese Communist Party
accountable.
“Weak on China? He’s weak period,”
Trump told Breitbart News. “Weak on China? China has never—they’ve paid us
billions and billions of dollars. They were having the worst year ever that
they’ve had in 67 years. Weak on China? Those guys were pathetic. If Biden got
elected, they’d own the United States within a very short period of time. China
would own the United States.”
Democrats sink to rock bottom with Biden By J. Marsolo
It would be difficult to nominate a worse
candidate than Hillary Clinton, but the Democrats will with the nomination of
Joe Biden.
Biden called President Trump the first "racist" president . This is plain historical
ignorance, stupidity, and lying.
About ten presidents, most of them
Democrats such as Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and Van Buren, owned slaves . Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, segregated federal employees . But the truth does not matter to
Biden.
Given today's divisive political and
cultural climate, to accuse the president of racism, without any evidence, is
defamatory and corrosive to our country, especially after the Russia Hoax.
Contrast Biden's unfounded accusation
against President Trump with his fond remembrances of working with fellow
segregationist Democratic senators. Biden said he worked
"civilly" with Democratic segregationist senators such as Senator
James Eastland. Biden said:
Even in the
days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight
old-fashioned Democratic segregationists. You'd get up and you'd argue
like the devil with them. Then you'd go down and have lunch or dinner
together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues,
but the political system worked.
As late as June 2019, Biden described
"segregation" as a difference on "issues," as if
segregation is an accepted view on the political issue of race relations.
How does Black Lives Matter accept Biden as the nominee?
Biden made a litany of racially
insensitive remarks. Most well known is when Biden said Obama was the
"first mainstream African-American who is articulate and
bright, clean, well spoken. That's a storybook man" (emphasis
added).
Biden said "first," as if there
were no articulate, bright, clean, well spoken black Americans before Obama.
How about Martin Luther King, Jr.? Professor Thomas Sowell? Condoleezza Rice?
Justice Thurgood Marshall? Justice Clarence Thomas?
Despite this, Obama selected Biden as his
V.P., which is strong evidence to rebut Biden's statement that Obama is
"bright."
A comprehensive analysis of Biden's
career that shows how unqualified he is for the presidency was written by a
union progressive activist, Ronald Dixon, who recounts Biden's history of
racist assumptions, corruption, lying, plagiarism, and mental decline, titled "The Long List of Reasons Why I Will Never Vote for
Joe Biden."
But CBS, ABC, NBC, MSN, CNN, the
Washington Post, the N.Y. Times, and other members of the media wing of the
Democratic Party have ignored and will ignore all past comments and conduct by
Biden and will ignore current statements by Biden that evidence his
incompetency due to his declining mental state.
The Democrats and the media know that
Biden is mentally incompetent. But they do not care. They care only
to beat President Trump. The Democratic media will protect Biden and contribute
to further dividing the country on race.
Biden was always a lying, corrupt
politician. Now he is a mentally incompetent, lying, corrupt politician.
A perfect fit for the modern Democratic Party and the media.
Image :
Marc Nozell via Flickr .
JOE BIDEN, SERVANT OF RED CHINA… .Just
follow the money through Hunter’s pockets.
Well, it
looks like the makeover has begun.
Corrupt
Joe Biden, who used his office to enrich himself and his family, to say the
least, is now the foreign policy maven, particularly on China. That's the spin
from the New York Times, which has beclowned itself badly, trying to tell the
audience that something smelly is shinola .
To voters unsettled by President Trump’s
disruptive approach to the world, Mr. Biden is selling not only his policy
prescriptions but also his long track record of befriending, cajoling and
sometimes confronting foreign leaders — what he might call the power of his
informal diplomatic style. “I’ve dealt with every one of the major world
leaders that are out there right now, and they know me. I know them,” he told
supporters in December.
Brett McGurk, a former senior State Department
official for the campaign against the Islamic State, said Mr. Biden had been an
effective diplomat by practicing “strategic empathy.”
And
unlike Trump, Biden was oh so personal, as well as "not an
ideologue."
Mr. Biden made a quick “personal connection” with
the Chinese leader, even if he sometimes confounded his Mandarin interpreter by
quoting hard-to-translate Irish verse, said Daniel Russel, an aide present at
several of the meetings.
“He was remarkably good in getting to a personal
relationship right away and getting Xi to open up,” Mr. Russel said.
Had
enough? The translation, according to Peter Schweizer's Profiles in Corruption
is:
For Vice President Joe Biden, effective diplomacy
was about forming personal relationships with foreign leaders. "It all
gets down to the conduct of foreign policy being personal." The vice
president had a series of important and tense meetings with Chinese officials
on a variety of critical matters in the bilateral relationship. The trip
coincided with an enormous financial deal that Hunter Biden's firm, Rosemont
Seneca, was arranging with the state-owned Bank of China. What Hunter did
during the official visit to Beijing we cannot know for sure. Other than a few
photo ops with his father, he was nowhere to be seen.
...and...
Approximately ten days after the Beijing trip,
Hunter Biden's Rosemont Seneca Partners finalized a deal with the Chinese
government worth a whopping $1 billion. The deal was later expanded to
$1.5 billion. As of this writing, the fund's website says its investments
amount to more than $2 billion.
It's important to note that this deal was with
the Chinese government--not with Chinese company, which means that the
Chinese government and the son of the vice president were now business partners.
Now
he's Mr. Congeniality, the perfect opposite of President Trump who confronts
China rather sternly on issues. To the Times, that's a bad thing. To the
average 'hey fat' out in the American heartland as Biden puts it, Trump's
diplomacy is actually standing up for the interests of Americans.
It's
also a disgusting double standard. Trump is no China hater - he does his best
to cut the best deal possible for main street America by driving a hard bargain
the Chinese know they have no choice but to accept. Any time Trump says
something concilatory to the Chinese, it's denounced as sucking up to
dictators, while any time Joe does it - pocketing the profits, which any
non-ideologue is adept at doing - he's Mr. Personality.
As
Mickey Kaus well observed:
When Trump does it it's coddling dictators, with Biden it's Strategic
Empathy! @michaelcrowley is at least a bit skeptical. https://t.co/Pnc9SqxAk4
— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) July
6, 2020
Here's
the problem with this kind of 'personal' diplomacy. It is very personal indeed
to Joe, given the wealth it has brought is family members. It's also very
dangerous, given that every string and hook China's oligarchs can get into him
makes him an even bigger sock puppet than he already was. Combine with the
world's dodgiest players considering Biden a non-entity (Osama bin Laden
considered Biden a fool) and the picture is a very ugly one for America's
interests.
Here's
the second problem: This apparent media makeover for Joe, painting him as the
great personal-touch diplomat who can get along with everyone is clearly the
new party line being promoted in the press, and we can expect to see lockstep
echoing of this embarassing face-lift. The JournoList talking points have gone
out and now the shots are fired. As those shots went out, attempting to boost
Joe while taking down Trump, the Chicoms themselves have been very active, too.
Just days ago, according to a report in the Daily Caller, the Chinese
investment firm that made Hunter a very rich man has quietly removed Hunter's
name as a board member. That's to help Joe win his presidential bid for sure,
which ought to make voters very wary given whose interests are being boosted.
Worse still, the Caller reports, they allowed him to keep his sizable stake in
the company - worth milions at least. No wonder he's comfortably ensconced in
the Hollywood Hills these days, bored and playing 'artist,' dodging release of
his financial statements to an Arkansas judge over a babydaddy case with a
stripper looking for child support. No wonder he apparently settled with the
woman and swept the whole thing off the front pages.
Now
the makeover is on, with the media ignoring the pocket-lining entirely -- the
New York Times makes simply no mention of it -- and the cash spigots still
going.
The
whole thing -- pocket-lining and media coverup is a disgusting double-load
of corruption that anyone with a brain can see right through. The GOP must keep
the heat onto this issue because it's being distorted beyond recognition.
Photo illustration by Monica
Showalter with use of images
by Gage
Skidmore, via Flickr // CC
BY-SA 2.0 , Acaben,
via Wikimedia Commons // CC
BY-SA 2.0 , PxFuel public domain ,
and SKopp
via Wikimedia Commons // public domain
We're not buying Joe Biden's 'tough on China' Act By Ken Blackwell
Joe
Biden is running away from his record as the "pro-China" candidate so
quickly that his defenders in the liberal press can't make heads or tails of it. Ordinary
Americans are equally confused.
Biden
spent over three decades opening American markets to Chinese goods, ignoring
China's abhorrent human rights record, and dismissing the challenge posed by
our greatest rival for global leadership. The "made in
China" era coincided with the closure of tens of thousands of American
factories, stagnant working-class wages, and the loss of America's ability to
produce essential goods domestically — a vulnerability that took on incredible
significance when we learned that we were dependent upon China to produce the
medical equipment needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
This
disaster was facilitated by politicians of both parties, and no one was
more gung ho than Joe
Biden, poster child for the globalism that reigned supreme until the
2016 presidential election, which Donald J. Trump won by campaigning on a
platform diametrically opposed to the "open markets and open borders"
philosophy of the D.C. establishment. In the White House, President
Trump became the first American leader in decades to take a firm stand against
China's malfeasance and demand a genuinely fair and reciprocal trade deal for
American workers.
While
Joe Biden was the vice president of the United States, conversely, he was downplaying the consequences of
China's rise — even as his own family tried to get rich through
deals with Chinese state-owned companies.
How
is it possible, then, that Biden has suddenly tried to recast himself as the
"tough-on-China" candidate in the 2020 race?
Biden's
campaign even ran an ad claiming the
president had "rolled over for the Chinese" in response to the
coronavirus that Beijing unleashed on the world. It's one of the
most poorly executed flip-flops in American electoral history, coming just
months after Biden called President
Trump's life-saving ban on most travel
from China "hysterical xenophobia."
No
one is buying it. Everyone knows about President Trump's record of
success in bringing China to the negotiating table through strategic
counter-tariffs. The "Phase One" trade deal that was inked
earlier this year represents the first major trade concessions from China in a
generation. Even the fanatical free-traders who actually liked Biden's
globalism see right through his new façade. The libertarians at the
Cato Institute, for instance, published an article
acknowledging that Biden's reversal is "futile" and "inherently
lacks credibility."
Even
the intellectual left is aghast at Biden's fake toughness on
China. The Atlantic called it "utterly
futile" and "pointless — even dangerous." The New
York Times published an op-ed all but begging Biden to drop the
act.
If
even his own supporters are rolling their eyes at Biden play-acting as a China
skeptic, why are he and his team even bothering to attempt the deception?
The
answer is simple. Americans have finally woken up to the economic
and national security threat posed by China. The coronavirus pandemic made that
threat impossible to ignore. No one wants to go into this November
as the "pro-Beijing" candidate.
Unfortunately
for Joe Biden, he's been the "pro-Beijing" candidate throughout his
political career, and there's a decades-long record to prove it.
Ken Blackwell served as mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio treasurer, and a
U.S. ambassador to the U.N. He currently serves on the board of
directors for Club For Growth.
Image : Marc Nozell via Flickr .
Hollywood is importing Chinese censorship to
the United States by Zachary Faria, Commentary Fellow |
|
August 11, 2020 07:31 AM
Hollywood likes to hold
itself out as a progressive pioneer of social justice, but a new report
highlights how the desire to get films into the Chinese market leads major film
studios to violate their own social justice dogma. In fact, it often leads them
to import the values of the Chinese Communist Party — the organization with the
highest body count in human history.
The report by PEN America, a
nonprofit organization that promotes free expression in literature, examines a
collection of films that bowed to Chinese censorship in order to get access to
the Chinese movie market. China allows 34 foreign films
to be released in the country each year, and in 2018, quarterly revenue from
China surpassed the United States for the first time. Before the pandemic, it
was projected that revenue from China in 2023 would reach $15.5 billion.
Some Chinese censorship
is minor, propaganda that can only be caught by alert viewers. Paramount cut
the Taiwanese flag from Tom Cruise’s jacket for the Top Gun sequel,
while the DreamWorks film Abominable (a collaboration with
China’s Pearl Studio) featured the nine-dash line, a propaganda map asserting
China’s control of the South China Sea.
Hollywood studios will
often run afoul of the tenets of social justice they often push in the U.S.
Marvel notably whitewashed a major Tibetan
character in Doctor Strange to avoid offending the Chinese
government. Studios ranging from Warner Brothers to Paramount to Twentieth
Century Fox have either removed scenes of same-sex kissing from films or had
them removed by China when the films aired. A complaint from a religious group
in the U.S., on the other hand, would only draw mockery.
The most troubling
takeaway from the report is not that individual scenes are being censored or
self-censored but that studios have decided to base major film decisions on
China, sometimes even unprompted. Marvel infamously brought in
Chinese regulators during the filming of Iron Man 3 to ensure
the movie stayed inbounds and added extra scenes to the Chinese version of the
film showing Chinese doctors saving Iron Man’s life.
The days of Hollywood
backing human rights in its work have disappeared. The 1997 film Seven
Years in Tibet , portraying China’s 1950 invasion of Tibet, led to the
blacklisting of director Jean-Jacques Annaud until his groveling apology 12
years later. Film star Brad Pitt was also penalized for the movie, which likely
helped bar World War Z from a Chinese release.
Change is not a lost
cause. The industry’s biggest stars have the power to push for it, as when
Quentin Tarantino refused to sign off on a re-cut of Once Upon a Time in
Hollywood to appease Chinese censors. But if Hollywood’s other
influential voices are unwilling to even stand up for their own creative
freedom, why would they take a stand on behalf of the human rights of people
they will never even meet?
No comments:
Post a Comment