BRIBES SUCKING SOCIOPATH LAWYER GAMING THE LAWS LIKE HE GAMES OUR BORDERS
The only thing Biden inherited, based on his family tree, was a lack of moral fiber.
Whether it’s oil or Afghanistan, Biden became the agent for enabling leftist ideological goals. His value, like that of any good agent, lies in being able to “humanize” a radical agenda with his grins, gladhandling, and malapropisms without looking like a radical. But that just makes him the final fall guy when the tattered remnants of his charm aren’t enough to deflect attention from the leftist wizards behind the curtain. And then it’ll be time for him to retire and spend “more time with his family”. His family being his crackhead artist son who almost cost him the election.
Blame Anyone But Biden
The president knows he’s disposable - and surrounds himself with scapegoats.
Thu Aug 26, 2021
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Biden and his cronies are busy blaming anyone and everyone else for Afghanistan.
Culprits for Biden’s folly thus far include the Trump administration, intelligence people (who warned him this would happen), the military (which also warned him this would happen), and Trump supporters whom the media implausibly alleges he was too afraid of to defy.
By next week, the media will find some way to blame Afghanistan on the unvaccinated, on systemic racism, and Ron DeSantis. Except that all the excuses aren’t working this time.
And that’s a problem because blaming other people for his failures is all Biden knows.
The Biden administration is one long search for scapegoats to protect the old goat at the top.
When gas prices soared, the Biden administration turned to OPEC to lower prices by raising output. OPEC's response was a contemptuous shrug that didn’t even acknowledge the little man in the big house while making it clear that it’s happy with the way things are.
Biden has no leverage with OPEC. He can’t open up American production because he’s in thrall to the Big Green lobby that is gobbling up a trillion dollars of the economy with its subsidized Chinese junk projects. A huge chunk of Biden’s infrastructure dollars are going to Big Green.
Some OPEC members have crucial security concerns about Iran. But Biden has made it clear that he’s going to appease Iran. If Iran goes nuclear, it will be able to choke off much of our oil supply from the region. And even before then Iran’s expanding terror sphere threatens OPEC members like Saudi Arabia which were shelled by Iran’s Houthi terrorists in Yemen.
The Biden administration cut off support for the campaign to dislodge the Houthis from Yemen.
Even without nukes, Iran’s terrorist proxy wars risk creating all sorts of instability. And that will affect energy prices and lead producers to act conservatively out of fear of the next crisis.
Biden won’t allow American energy companies to compete with OPEC. And he isn’t offering any real sense of security to OPEC members in the region. Why should OPEC raise production?
But Biden wasn’t serious about expecting OPEC to raise production.
A recurring theme of his failed administration has been finding someone else to blame for his disasters. The lousy economy, the pandemic, and the collapse of Afghanistan are always someone else’s fault. The Biden administration’s messaging machine exists to play politics with the pandemic while blaming its latest setback on DeSantis, Trump, or disinformation.
The Biden administration didn’t expect OPEC to do anything. They were just seeking another scapegoat for Biden’s bad decisions. The media will receive its administration talking points blaming high energy prices, not on Biden’s Keystone XL pipeline cancelation, his hostility to the domestic energy industry, and the rising instability due to the rise of Iran, but on OPEC refusing to boost production. But who made America dependent on OPEC and, by extension, Iran?
The same politician who made Americans trapped in Afghanistan dependent on the Taliban
Biden wanted credit for withdrawing from Afghanistan when he thought it would make him look good. Once the Taliban took over, he began whining that he had “inherited” the withdrawal.
The only thing Biden inherited, based on his family tree, was a lack of moral fiber.
The dumbest and most destructive elements of the withdrawal, the evacuation of soldiers before civilians, the stealthy withdrawals from bases, the refusal to coordinate with NATO allies, had nothing to do with Trump or even the general idea of a withdrawal. It was Biden’s call whether to withdraw the troops before the civilians, and it was the absolute wrong one.
Even in the final hours before the fall of Afghanistan, Biden could have secured Kabul.
The Taliban kept indicating that they didn’t want to enter Kabul. Whether they really meant it or were testing our response, this was the opportunity to send in forces, secure Kabul, and create a safe evacuation zone for Americans. Instead, Biden dithered. Having American soldiers secure the city would have made it very difficult to then pull out the troops.
Biden and his people decided that it was better to abandon Americans behind Taliban lines and hope that they can negotiate their way out, than to be stuck being responsible for Kabul.
Since then the Taliban have reportedly handed over security in Kabul over to the Haqqani Network which is a component of the Taliban that is intertwined with Al Qaeda, has carried out numerous terrorist attacks, and is holding an American hostage.
But Biden prioritized forcing a harsh break at any cost over the lives and safety of Americans.
Now that the strategy has failed, in the sense that it’s widely unpopular, the Biden administration is searching for scapegoats. Biden is blaming intelligence and the military. The intelligence people are blaming the military and the diplomats. The diplomats are blaming the military. And the military knows that its job is to take the fall for every stupid thing that the politicians do.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, beginning with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and General Milley, Secretary of State Blinken, and CIA Director William Burns. But their underlying failure was following orders. Milley had boasted of undermining President Trump by refusing to go along with his proposals, but he was happy enough to enable anything that Biden wanted.
The intelligence reports were there. And it’s impossible to imagine the military brass and their aides didn’t understand the risks of a scenario in which the Taliban trapped Americans behind enemy lines while only a meager force of 600 American troops remained to protect them.
They gave Biden what he wanted. And now Biden is blaming them for giving it to him.
Whether it’s oil or Afghanistan, Biden became the agent for enabling leftist ideological goals. His value, like that of any good agent, lies in being able to “humanize” a radical agenda with his grins, gladhandling, and malapropisms without looking like a radical. But that just makes him the final fall guy when the tattered remnants of his charm aren’t enough to deflect attention from the leftist wizards behind the curtain. And then it’ll be time for him to retire and spend “more time with his family”. His family being his crackhead artist son who almost cost him the election.
Biden knows he’s disposable and surrounds himself with scapegoats. And that leads to a work culture in which no one goes out on a limb to avoid becoming one of Biden’s scapegoats.
Why did none of the brass, the intel people, or the diplomats stand up to Biden?
Why does every interview or press conference by an administration official seem like a parade of excuses for inaction? The safest thing for anyone to do is to do nothing and let the blame rise, like hot air, up to Biden who, for at least one term, is considered too big to fail.
Biden’s age and mental state have created an unprecedentedly weak administration.
Few expect him to run for a second term. And whether he’s replaced by Kamala, another Democrat, or a Republican, there will be a clean sweep leaving few of the old gang.
A weak king inspires little loyalty. Biden’s loyalists don’t expect him to be around for long and they have little incentive to prop him up for a second term that isn’t likely to ever happen.
They have no loyalty to Biden, he has none to them, and none of them have any to America.
US House vote to move forward on budget framework heralds major cuts in $3.5 trillion price tag
After days of internal wrangling and delays, House Democrats on Tuesday narrowly passed a procedural rule supporting the Biden administration’s $3.5 trillion budget resolution, making it possible for an eventual budget bill to pass by majority vote in the evenly-divided Senate. This would be done under the special budget reconciliation procedure, which bars the use of a filibuster and thereby averts the need to obtain 60 votes for passage of legislation in the upper chamber.
The measure, passed on a party-line vote of 220-212, with all Democrats voting in favor and all Republicans voting against, also advanced a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill passed earlier this month by the Senate.
The infrastructure bill, allocating some $550 billion of new money over five years to at least minimally address the nation’s crumbling brick and mortar infrastructure—bridges, roads, rail, broadband, the power grid and water systems—is broadly supported in the ruling class. Among the bill’s official supporters are the US Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers and the AFL-CIO. The 19 Senate Republicans who voted for the bill included Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Some attention to the country’s collapsing infrastructure is considered critical to reversing the global economic decline of American capitalism and shoring up the home front in preparation for economic warfare and potential military conflict with US imperialism’s rivals, chiefly nuclear-armed China and Russia.
The $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” budget plan, on the other hand, has far less support within the corporate-financial oligarchy, particularly Biden’s call for a modest increase in corporate taxes and the personal rate for the top bracket. The budget resolution calls for an expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, subsidized child care and elder care, paid family and sick leave, tuition-free community college, an extension of child and earned income tax credits, modest measures to combat climate change and liberalized granting of green cards to immigrants, along with more money to militarize the border with Mexico.
The Democrats have elevated Bernie Sanders, the darling of the Democratic Socialists of America and other pseudo-left appendages of the Democratic Party, to usher the bill through the Senate. Sanders has absurdly compared the plan to the New Deal of the 1930s.
In fact, the $350 billion per year over 10 years proposed in the budget outline is less than half of Biden’s 2022 Pentagon budget, less than the $400 billion the 15 richest Americans added to their collective wealth in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a fraction of the $1.44 trillion per year the Federal Reserve pumps into the financial markets through its monthly purchases of $120 billion in corporate bonds and other financial assets.
The Republican Party is solidly against the budget plan, and considerable sections of Democratic officials and their corporate backers are also opposed.
In the event, passage by the House required days of intense negotiations between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a group of nine right-wing House Democrats, who said they would vote against the budget resolution unless the House voted first to approve the bipartisan infrastructure bill and send it to President Biden’s desk to be signed into law. The Democrats could afford to lose only three votes from within their caucus due to the narrowness of their majority.
The position of the nine so-called “centrists,” echoed in the Senate by right-wing Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, threatened to torpedo both the budget package and the infrastructure bill, as some 100 liberal House Democrats warned that they would vote against the infrastructure bill if Pelosi retreated from her promise to withhold action on the narrower infrastructure measure until the Senate had passed the more expansive budget plan.
To overcome the opposition of the Democratic holdouts, Pelosi made a significant concession, incorporating into the procedural rule a pledge to bring the infrastructure bill to a vote in the House by September 27, regardless of whether the “human infrastructure” budget bill had passed in the Senate.
Statements from both factions following the vote made clear that the divisions remain, underscoring that any budget bill that might pass the Senate and come to the House would be radically reduced from the already inadequate social provisions in the budget outline handed down by Biden.
The right-wing Democrats led by Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey said the deal “does what we set out to do: secure a standalone vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, send it to the President’s desk, and then separately consider the reconciliation package.”
On the other side, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal said the two proposals were “integrally tied together, and we will only vote for the infrastructure bill after passing the reconciliation bill.”
For her part, Pelosi issued a statement saying she was “committing to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill by September 27” and would “rally” her caucus to pass it. She went on to stress that she aimed to pass a budget reconciliation bill that could get through the Senate, i.e., that she would support major cuts to the social spending outlined in the budget resolution. Both Manchin and Sinema have declared that they will not vote for a budget bill with a $3.5 trillion price tag.
In an editorial posted on Monday, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post urged the Democratic “centrists” in the House against voting down the budget resolution, for fear that the liberals would respond by voting down the infrastructure bill.
“That would be a disaster for the nation,” the newspaper wrote, “which needs both investment in roads and rails and assurance that the political system can still sometimes work. … Centrists should force a debate on the cost [of the $3.5 trillion budget plan], streamlining new proposed programs, insisting on more substantial pay-fors, or both.”
The budget resolution is a mere outline, with proposed items and indicated spending levels. Its passage by both chambers of Congress sets in motion weeks of closed-door lobbying, horse-trading and outright bribery by corporate interests as dozens of committees in the House and Senate draft specific spending bills. The Democratic leadership has instructed the various committees to complete their portions of the overall measure by September 15.
The result, assuming that any bill is passed, is certain to be even less adequate to deal with the massive social and public health crisis in America than the much-hyped Biden proposal.
No comments:
Post a Comment