SEN. TOM COTTON TELLS BIDEN TO STOP KISSING PUTIN'S ASS - Cotton: ‘It’s Time to Remove All Russian Financial Institutions from the International Payment System’

 

Cotton: ‘It’s Time to Remove All Russian Financial Institutions from the International Payment System’

TRENT BAKER

27 Feb 20220

2:09

Sunday, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) pushed to completely cut off Russia from the SWIFT international banking system to stop Russian aggression toward Ukraine.

Cotton told ABC’s “This Week” that to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin, “it’s time to remove all Russian institutions from the international payment system” and “impose sanctions on his oil and gas exports.”

“[T] here’s a lot more we can do,” Cotton outlined. “I first want to join all Arkansans in expressing my prayers and our support for the brave Ukrainians who are repulsing Vladimir Putin’s naked, unprovoked war of aggression. You’ve seen Ukrainian army elements overmatched with armor and airpower repulsing these attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv and other cities. We’ve seen moms with their kids making Molotov cocktails, George — grandmas and grandpas who are reporting to get AKs so they can fight as well. But we can do more than prayers and hashtags and lighting up buildings, George. It’s time for the president and some of our European partners to quit pussyfooting around. The financial sanctions announced last night are riddled with loopholes.”

“I know that they say they’ve sanctioned 80% of the banks in Russia — well, Vladimir Putin controls 100% of the banks in Russia,” he continued. “He can use the other 20% to continue to finance his war machine. It’s time to remove all Russian financial institutions from the international payment system. It’s time to impose sanctions on his oil and gas exports, which he uses as his primary means of financial support. We need to rush those weapons that were announced for delivery yesterday to the front: anti-tank, anti-aircraft missiles, sniper rifles, ammunition, fuel supplies. It should have been done weeks ago, so better late than never. But the Ukrainians no time. They have no time, George. There’s not a minute to lose. And we need to stand with them.”

Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent

Awkward: Asked if He Underestimated Putin, Biden Stares Vacantly and Picks His Teeth

Everyone - including our enemies - can see he's not in charge.

Mon Feb 28, 2022 

Robert Spencer

It’s one of the most awkward twenty seconds ever captured on video in a disastrous administration that lurches from one awkward moment to another: when asked “Do you think you may have underestimated Putin?,” Old Joe Biden first continued to stare in the general direction of the question, a slight smirk on his face, expression absolutely unchanged from what it had been before the question was asked. A few seconds later he turned his head to face the camera and, after a few more seconds, grinned sardonically. A few seconds later, he began picking his teeth with his thumbnail, and then grins a bit vacantly before the video mercifully runs out. Amid all the wrong choices, erroneous policies, abject failures, and stupid missteps of this disastrous administration, it was a trivial moment, but it was a telling one.

Biden has more than once made it clear that he isn’t the person in charge. On Dec. 21, 2021, he told a press conference: “I’m not supposed to be having this press conference right now.” Why not? Who was telling him not to? No one in the sycophantic Leftist establishment media seemed to think it newsworthy to ask the president of the United States who was telling him what he was supposed to be and not supposed to be doing, and so we can only guess.

Nor was that the first time that Biden had hinted that he was just a puppet in the Oval Office. In  June 2021 at the G7 Summit, Biden said: “I’m sorry, I’m going to get in trouble with staff if I don’t do this the right way.” At a press conference in Nov. 2021, the Oval Office puppet gave the impression that he was not supposed to take too many questions: “I can take…I’m going to get in real trouble … this is the last question I’m taking.” On Sept. 8, 2021, Biden announced to a puzzled world, “I‘m supposed to stop and walk out of the room.” On Aug. 30, 2021, he told a reporter, “I’m not supposed to take any questions, but go ahead,” but when the question turned out to involve his catastrophic mishandling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said: “I’m not gonna answer Afghanistan now,” and walked away.

Biden’s press conferences are scripted; on June 19, 2021, he said: “I’ll take your questions, and as usual, folks, they gave me a list of the people I’m going to call on.” Through all this, however, the establishment media steadfastly refuses to ask Biden who is running things and telling him what to do. That person may be Barack Obama, who said in late 2020: “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front-man or front-woman and they had an earpiece in and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony, I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” But since everyone is determined to keep up the façade, we may never know either way.

Anyway, what happened when Biden was asked if he underestimated Putin? He may have judged that it was a lose-lose situation: if he answered that he hadn’t underestimated him, the situation in Ukraine would stand as a rebuke to his claims, but had he admitted that he had underestimated Putin, he would be admitting to an error, which his pride and political calculation will never allow him to do. Or did his scripted notes not cover such a question, and so it had to be ignored?

There are any number of other possibilities, but the length of the awkward situation is also odd. A White House aide can be heard saying “Thank you” several times at the beginning of the video, apparently shooing reporters out so they won’t ask Old Joe tough questions such as, “Did you underestimate Putin?” But they don’t manage to stop the video feed until we get to watch the old man stare vacantly into space and pick his teeth. Biden’s handlers are so weak and feckless that they can’t even competently provide the illusion that their man is in cool, confident command. Everyone can see it. Vladimir Putin can see it. Xi Jinping can see it. They and others are going to act upon what they see.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

After Sanctions on Russia Fail, Biden Lies About Why He Imposed Them

He must think no one is paying attention.

Mon Feb 28, 2022 

Robert Spencer

 15 comments

After over fifty years in public life, Old Joe Biden has a well-deserved reputation for dishonesty, and he added to it Thursday while trying to save face after Vladimir Putin ignored his sanctions threats and invaded Ukraine. The sanctions, you see, were intended to stop Putin in his tracks. When they failed to do so before the eyes of a watching world, Biden did not, of course, admit that he had miscalculated or underestimated Putin. Instead, he simply changed his story, with all the insouciance he displayed as a young Syracuse University College of Law student plagiarizing a law review article. He must think no one is paying attention.

Biden emphasized Thursday that the sanctions were not meant to stop Putin from invading Ukraine or to get him to call off the invasion. “No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening,” he claimed. “This could take time and we have to show resolve so he knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he’s brought on them, this is what this is all about. This is going to take time, it’s not going to occur … he’s gonna say ‘Oh my God, these sanctions are coming, I’m gonna stand down.’”

Well, all right, Joe, but why does no one on your team seem to know this? That noted lodestar of foreign policy expertise, Kamala Harris, contradicted you on Sunday when she said,

“The purpose of the sanctions has always been and continues to be deterrence.” She asserted that this was a “shared perspective among our allies. And the Allied relationship is such that we have agreed that the deterrence effect of these sanctions is still a meaningful one, especially because … we still sincerely hope that there is a diplomatic path out of this moment. And within the context then of the fact that that window is still open although it is absolutely narrowing — but within the context of a diplomatic path still being open, the deterrence effect, we believe, has merit.” Well, great, but either it does or it doesn’t, and why don’t the putative president and vice president have their story straight?

Harris wasn’t alone among the Bidenites in saying that the sanctions would deter Putin from striking Ukraine. On Feb. 11 — you know, way before Canada became a dictatorship for a week and Putin decided that Biden’s handlers were so weak that he could essentially do whatever he wanted — National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan attributed a belief in the deterrent power of sanctions to Biden himself: “The President believes that sanctions are intended to deter. And in order for them to work — to deter, they have to be set up in a way where if Putin moves, then the costs are imposed. We believe that that is the right logic, both on its own merits, but equally importantly, we believe that the most important fundamental for anything that unfolds in this crisis, whether through diplomacy or as a result of military action, is that the West be strong, be united, and be determined to operate with common purpose.”

An unnamed senior Biden administration official repeated this as recently as Tuesday, saying of the sanctions, “They’re not an end to themselves. Sanctions are meant to serve a higher purpose, which is to deter and prevent. So, we want to prevent a large-scale invasion of Ukraine that involves the seizure of major cities, including Kyiv. We want to prevent large-scale human suffering, possibly tens of thousands of lives that could be lost in a full-scale conflict. And we want to prevent Putin from installing a puppet government that bends to his wishes and denies Ukraine the freedom to set its own course and choose its own destiny. That’s what this is all about.” “This” referred to the application of sanctions.

On Wednesday, Jen Psaki explained that the sanctions had two purposes: “One is implementing serious costs for the actions that have already been taken — so, the actions in the Donbas. Second, yes, deterrence is part of our objective. If he goes further, we will go further. We have a range of tools at our disposal. I mentioned some of the potential financial … steps we could take that could impact financial institutions. That is very significant and could have a very significant impact, but we have far more options beyond that, including export controls.”

So do the sanctions deter, or don’t they?

Clearly, they don’t, or the Russian army wouldn’t be at Kyiv. In response to yet another indication that he is an abject failure as president, or his handlers are, Biden simply lies again. It’s the hallmark of his disastrous presidency.

American Appeasement of Russia Led to War in Ukraine

By Daniel Duffy

As I write this, the first shells are exploding in Ukraine in what promises to be the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945.  The most frustrating part is that this was all preventable.  This was not an unseen, spontaneous natural disaster.  The lessons of history are there for us to learn from, but the West has willfully ignored them.  A long chain of appeasement that runs across administrations and countries has emboldened Putin and resurrected his dream of a revived Soviet Union.

It's important to understand the nature of Russia.  For all intents and purposes, Russia is a dictatorship.  Putin himself was a former KGB thug.  He has vast power of the government, economy, and media.  Its "elections" are mere political theater.  In 2011, massive crowds in Russia protested his rigged "re-election."  The leading pro-democracy activist, Alexei Navalny, was poisoned by the Kremlin and now sits in jail.  The Kremlin has killed former party members and dozens of journalists.  The Russian government repeatedly sponsors cyber-attacks and has attempted to interfere with elections of Western countries.  It supports dictators around the world, including in Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.  In 2018, Russian mercenaries directly attacked U.S. forces in Syria.  Now the world watches in horror as Putin's army launches an unprovoked attack on Ukraine.   

Putin has begun all this for a couple of intertwined reasons: nationalism and power.  He's said the collapse of the Soviet Union was "a major geopolitical disaster of the century."  It is nationalism in the most primitive, tribal, Nazi-like form — the elevation of some mystical "motherland" above all rights of individuals, including Russians.  Putin feels betrayed that the Ukrainians are increasingly sympathetic to the West, economically and spiritually.  He wants to punish them and simultaneously send a message to his people.  Freedom-loving people are a threat to his power.  He sees former Soviet states like Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and others join the E.U. and become prosperous.  Therefore, he tries to sow discontent in Western countries any way he can.  He can be seen then as the stable alternative and reassert Russia's sphere of influence.  Because America is still seen as a symbol of freedom to people around the world, we are naturally his enemy.    

So what have been the West's relations with Russia?  Any discussion of this topic cannot leave out energy.  Europe's pursuit of green energy has left it vulnerable to Russia.  Forty percent of Europe's natural gas is supplied from Russia.  This is a result of a combination of banning fracking in many countries, restricting imports of LNG (liquefied natural gas) combined with America restricting LNG exports, and the shutting down of nuclear and coal plants.  Europe's dependence means it's feeding the bear that threatens it.

In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia.  Shortly after, President Obama announced a "reset" policy with Russia.  This was consistent with President Bush, who found Putin "straightforward and trustworthy."  In 2014, Putin punished Ukraine for ousting its pro-Russian puppet president by annexing Crimea.  The West responded with tepid sanctions.  President Trump equated Putin's killings of journalists and dissidents with the actions of the United States not once, but twice.  "There are a lot of killers," Trump told Bill O'Reilly in a 2017 interview.  "You think our country's so innocent?"  In 2015, he said, "I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, so you know."  He continued to describe Putin as a leader and someone whom he respects.

No, the United States isn't perfect.  But the lack of moral clarity when equating a country that has representational government, freedom of speech, real elections, a mostly free economy, and a separation of church and state with the monstrosity of a dictator like Putin emboldens the Kremlin and does real damage.  Putting Putin on an equal footing affects the way we think of our relations with him.

If someone were your moral equal, why would you hesitate to become largely dependent on him for natural gas?  To Trump's credit, he did in fact warn Europe that this was not a good idea.  But the point is that the lack of moral clarity dilutes our thinking.  It would be like going into business with a known con man — you are only fooling yourself.  It also gives the Kremlin the green light to accelerate thuggish tactics because it sends the message that we do not care.  Trump's quote is indicative of the waffling Western leaders have shown toward Putin. 

So what's wrong with the precedents set by all these administrations?  The common denominator is that they negate the nature of Russia.  The West views these events — invasion of Georgia here, attacking American troops there — as episodic.  Westerners haven't connected the dots.

In relation to other nations, the first questions one should ask is, what type of country is this?  Is it mostly free or controlled?  Does it respect individual rights?  How can its past inform us?  What are its ambitions?  Any honest assessment of Russia would have concluded that it was not a country to be trusted, much less become dependent on for natural gas, as Europe has.  Instead, we project our sense of life onto Russia and assume that the Russians think like us.  Consider the context of Obama's "reset" policy.  Stable, good-willed countries don't invade other countries for no reason.  This should have been a huge clue for Obama that Putin and the Russian government are not like other foreign nations.  Treating them as if they were only sanctions their behavior.

I am not saying we should have gone to war with Russia.  I am saying there is plenty the West could have done to deter Russian aggression outside military action: sanctions with teeth, diversifying energy, and morally condemning the hell out of their aggression, for starters. 

This last point is important.  The power of the bully pulpit cannot be overstated.  One of the best traits Ronald Reagan had was that he called a spade a spade.  The "evil empire" is what he called the Soviet Union.  After the Berlin wall fell, freedom-fighters in the eastern bloc said his rhetoric had given them courage and hope.  There is something motivating to knowing that the United States is on your side.

Today's leaders have lost that power of rhetoric.  There is no animating love of freedom running through their veins.  There are no spokesmen for the American story.  The Russians and the Chinese fear it.  They fear it because of the ideas it represents.  At some level, they know freedom beats authoritarianism every time.  They don't want that to be broadcast to the world.  That's the kind of spirit that needs to be revived in America and in the West if we want to avoid the mistakes of the past.

Image via Pexels.