War in Ukraine! Oh, wait! Biden's here to save the day (or maybe not)
Biden’s administration was circling the drain when, suddenly, like a drowning man thrown a lifebuoy, Biden got to play the heroic Commander-in-Chief trying to save the world from Russian aggression. As always, though, Biden came across as more stupid than statesmanlike. Along with insisting that he could pinpoint Russian aggression to the minute (no, he couldn’t), Biden frightened Ukraine and the members of NATO with his hawkishness. He then sent the moronic Kamala Harris to make things better at the Ukraine border. None of this seemed real...and maybe it wasn’t.
Sundance, who writes at Conservative Treehouse, questions the weird diplomatic dance we’re witnessing. Two of his posts are worth reading. Even if you don’t agree with his take, they’re still thought-provoking.
In the first post, Sundance writes that Biden’s Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, was facing a terrible situation: Inflation is soaring, energy prices are soaring even more, our southern border is gone, and Biden failed to cure COVID. His polls are in free fall. Klain needed misdirection in the form of a Biden success, even if only a fake one, to distract from Biden’s endless, and real, failures. First, say Biden isn’t responsible for all the bad things:
Within the book of instructions for the ideological Chicago crew (Alinsky peeps), there are chapters on how to create off-ramps to cloud their agenda. If they need a bigger cloud, they create a bigger crisis. The crisis then becomes the cover, the justification to explain the outcomes of their agenda.
In the latest example, the White House is shifting blame for the collapsing economy, surging oil prices, massive gas price increases and overall U.S. inflation.
The manufactured crisis in Ukraine then takes on a geopolitical angle and a domestic angle. The prior rate of inflation is now being blamed on Russia-Ukraine.
The media, of course, are helping. And why shouldn’t they? Cries of “Russia, Russia, Russia” kept them afloat for the four years of Trump’s presidency, and it’s reasonable to believe that those cries will rally the base once more.
Image: Biden by Andrea Widburg.
Having shifted the blame for everything onto Russia, Biden gets to step into the limelight and make the world wonderful and safe again. The news Sunday was that France had brokered a meeting between Biden and Putin, at which Biden gets to play the all-powerful peacemaker. Sundance believes this will be the denouement to the little play we’ve been witnessing:
Everything about the Russia invasion of Ukraine has to be increasingly imminent, horrible and loomingly catastrophic for the planet, so that when it doesn’t happen the glorious victory for Dear Leader Biden can be proclaimed and amplified from the mountaintops.
Russia has absolutely no plan to invade Ukraine and doesn’t even have a role in this theatrical production from the White House.
The way the game is played; and believe me, everything about this is a game; they must take the manufactured crisis to the brink of thermonuclear war, so that Joe Biden can save the world and be seen as this legendary diplomat.
In the annals of U.S. history, there has never been such an important summit. The nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, that Ron Klain wants in this mid-term election year, is dependent on magnanimous and strategic Biden overcoming all geopolitical odds to save the world.
This all strikes me as eminently believable. There is no reason for the U.S. to get its knickers in a twist about what happens “over there.” Obama already paved the way for Putin back in 2014 when he blustered a little bit but then gave the Crimea to Putin. America has no vested interests in the region. Moreover, thanks to the USSR having long practiced in Eastern Ukraine the same replacement policy that Biden is visiting on America with his open southern border, large swaths of Ukraine have an entirely Russian allegiance.
Significantly, Biden, for all his bluster, has done nothing to stop Putin. Both Secretary of State Blinken and Kamala Harris twisted themselves into pretzels to avoid acknowledging that the Biden administration’s threats of severe sanctions are meaningless because the administration promises to impose them only after what it claims is a certain invasion. If the invasion is certain, as the administration insists, ex post facto sanctions won’t stop it.
Additionally, Biden has already given the go-ahead to Putin to have a pipeline to Europe while blocking an Israeli one that would have given Europe an energy alternative. (The Israeli pipeline would also have forced both Europe and the Muslim nations to make peace with, or at least stop attacking, a major energy supplier).
Maybe there’ll be a war; maybe there won’t. But the one thing we can be sure of is that everything we’re seeing now is theater meant to distract us from Biden’s failures and to provide Biden with an opportunity to appear effective and meaningful.
The meme emerges that Joe Biden must be a closet Republican
Joe Biden has become toxic not just for the country, but for Democrats, who are reaping the consequences of foisting a declining old man on the voting public and getting him installed as president. So harmful is his incompetence to the party that, inevitably, wags are suggesting tongue-in-cheek that he me must be a Republican plant. For example, this by John W. Childs, titled, “Joe Biden: Closet Republican?”
from the New York Sun:
I wrote an earlier op-ed suggesting that the Biden budget might have been designed in Beijing, so favorable was it to Chinese aspirations of world domination. His current agenda looks as if it might have been devised by the Republican National Committee, so favorable is it to Republican aspirations of domestic political domination.
Let me count the ways, starting with Mr. Biden’s hysterical (in the sense of panicky, not funny) advocacy of the voting rights bill, HR1. He alternately shrieks, or whispers, that our democracy depends on it. Among its many puzzling provisions it would ban any requirements for voter ID. This is politically counterintuitive as most polls show voter ID is supported by something like 70 percent of the voters, even a majority of those supposedly at risk of suppression.
Take Mr. Biden’s border policy. The contrast between Mr. Biden’s shrill support of extreme antiseptic measures when it comes to Covid among citizens versus the welcome mat for unmasked, unvaxed, and untested aliens is startling. This wave of untested individuals is a visual that should rally GOP voters new and old.
It's good political humor, but any writers using this sort of irony have to realize that they follow in the wake of a masterpiece of political satire published almost 30 years ago with Hillary Clinton (who somehow still remains on the political scene) as its target. Ron Unz took note that while she was in high school in the early 1960s, Hillary Clinton had been a Barry Goldwater supporter, her first foray into political activism. Such young women were at the time called “Goldwater girls.”
If I recall, when first published in the California Political Review, the essay was called “Letter to a Goldwater Girl.” It is currently archived in what Ron Unz calls the “Goldwater Papers.” Take a look at the first few paragraphs and, if you are in the mood for biting sature on a target that richly deserves it, read the whole thing:
The following correspondence was found in the personal papers of a retired U.S. Senator from Arizona after his death in 1998.
Dearest H.,
Almost 30 years have gone by, and nobody suspects a thing! The strength of your determination still astonishes me. I never dreamed that the fiery “Goldwater” girl who visited me in my Chicago hotel room a couple of weeks after my landslide defeat in 1964 was serious. After all, when a teenage girl swears to go underground and dedicate the rest of her life to destroying American Liberalism and the Democratic Party, but from within, a crusty old politician like me assumes it’s a passing phase.. I’d certainly forgotten our conversation within a few weeks, though I was charmed by your spirited support.
How wrong I was. When I got your letter shortly after your husband was elected Attorney General of Arkansas in ’76, your name meant absolutely nothing to me. As an old male chauvinist, how could I reject a lunch request from a lady, even one who mentioned she was visiting Arizona to attend an ACLU conference. When we sat down, and you explained who you were and what you’d been doing over the previous 10 years, I thought you’d escaped from the loony bin. But then you showed it all to me, your pages of notes, your secret diary, your strategy outline, all perfectly authentic. The boldness of your plan floored me. If even just a few of our intelligence agents had been of your caliber, those damn commies in ‘Nam would never have stood a chance.
Imagine, “converting” to the Left at Wellesley, having your consciousness raised, learning to dress Left, act Left, talk Left, even think Left, all as a cover. Learning your lessons so well, you not only became a solid member of those college pinkos, but one of the leaders, student body president and a key figure at college conferences. With the contacts you made at those conferences you were able to evaluate which of those college leftists had the greatest political potential. You even slept with bums you personally and politically detested ever searching for the man to be your future instrument. Mata Hari has nothing on you.
And then you finally found him. As you’ve told me so many times since, he was a complete boob, an empty windbag, a politician to the core, with no goals except fame, women, and the good graces of his trendy-leftist social set. He was perfect: a Rhodes Scholar, but not a very smart guy, and he came from the tiny state of Arkansas, where it would be easy to launch a political career. He was an anti-war activist – but not an extreme one – a soft compliant fellow, who would always recognize that you were far more intelligent and knowledgeable, and who would willingly let himself be molded like putty in your hands. Even before you were married, while he was at Oxford, you persuaded him to “maintain his future political viability” by risking the draft lottery. You always emphasized to him his great political potential, and how important it would be for him to make the “right” friends among the other Rhodes Scholars.
Then later, after marriage and Yale Law School (where you diligently helped the blockhead in his coursework), the efforts you had to make to get him to move back to Arkansas, and re-establish his country-boy roots, so necessary for the political future you were planning. He’d have been perfectly content to spend the rest of his life seducing co-eds as a second-rate law lecturer at the lower rungs of the Ivy League. And the media thinks that you followed him back to Arkansas!
After that it was all like clockwork. Local boy who made good in the Big City gets interested in local politics, then becomes state Attorney General, then became one of the youngest governors in American history, and finally begins to build a national following. And all that time, you turned a blind-eye to his heavy womanizing, though you kept those photos around just in case he ever tried to slip the leash. Not that he would try – he knew you were aiming at the White House, though he never dreamed of your true motives.
Ron Unz, I salute you.
Caricature by Donkey Hotey CC BY-=SA 2.0 license
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