“As if to put to rest forever all of those ticklish inquiries about Providence, the grave and trying moment in which we now find ourselves has brought with it a hero capable of rivaling any other. Her name is Vice President Kamala Harris, and she is to the nugatory platitude what Michelangelo was to the marble block: All challengers flee before her, all pretenders quit their thrones at the mere mention of her name. Listen carefully and one can hear the desperation as the most accomplished rattlebrains in America issue condign sighs of dismay. How talented is Harris? Talented enough to make the inanities uttered by her rival Pete Buttigiegsoundsubstantive, concise, and apprehensible. Talented enough to make Dan Quayle seem like Pericles. Talented enough to make Marjorie Taylor Greene remind one of top-form Jane Austen. Never, in the field of human rhetoric, has an experiment in political growth been such a spectacular and unmitigated bust.
To the uninitiated, Harris’s exquisite bromides may seem all to run together, like The Ring Cycle or Ulysses. And yet, as the Eskimo is able to distinguish between 400 types of snow, so the experienced Harris-watcher will learn to differentiate between the many innovative ways in which she is able to convey that she has no damned idea what she’s talking about…”
And to think she’s one thrown clot away from running the country…
…completely into the ground.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, in what will come as a shock to no one with the slightest grip on reality, NRO‘s Caroline Downey reports…
“Contrary to President Biden’s recent claims that his administration is pulling out all the stops to alleviate America’s inflation woes, since its early days it has fostered a policy environment that is hostile to domestic energy production, fueling price hikes at the gas pump long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to memos obtained by National Review.
On the day Biden took office, his Department of the Interior issued a memo suspending the authority of local Bureau of Land Management offices to approve leases, drilling permits, and mining operations plans that would support America’s oil supply, Republican senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska explained on the House floor Monday night. Sixty days later, a second memo was sent out by political appointee Laura Daniel Davis extending the suspension of local authorities indefinitely and making the fate of all future leasing and drilling permits contingent on her personally rubber-stamping them.
A month ago on February 15, as the conflict in Ukraine took a turn for the worst and Western nations retaliated against Russia with economic penalties, amid already record-high gas prices, Biden told the public, “We’re prepared to deploy all the toolsand authority at our disposal to provide relief at the gas pump.”
He assured Americans last week, “It’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production. That’s simply not true.”
But these memos, obtained by National Review, appear to show that the Biden administration intentionally handicapped the domestic oil industry from day one as part of its mission to transition the U.S. to a green economy. Now that gas prices and inflation are reaching record heights, Biden has pinned a large chunk of responsibility on Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose attack on Ukraine has created tumult in energy markets, given that much of the West, particularly Europe, is dependent on Russia for oil.
…While there’s little evidence that American energy companies are price gouging by intentionally limiting supply, as Psaki and Biden have implied, “there’s a lot of evidence that Biden administration policies have been detrimental to oil production supply in this country,” Padgett claimed. “The simple fact that we’re seeing less incentive to enter and produce in this market when you know that Biden administration is going out of its way to be unfriendly to oil production.”
This past January, the Biden administration also took half of the 23 million acres of federal land in National Petroleum Reserve Alaska “off the table” for drilling, Padgett added.
The U.S. is producing approximately one million fewer barrels of oil a day than in 2019, when the pandemic hit and production had been ramping up. About 700,000 barrels that year were imported each day from Russia. Those imports have since been banned as part of the sanctions response to the Ukraine invasion.
Another member of Sullivan’s staff said that if the U.S. could resume its old production patterns, we would be producing 300,000 more barrels a day to cushion the U.S. amid the current energy crisis, but that’s been inhibited by the Biden administration’s policies.“
Understand, Biden doesn’t give a fig about green energy. Besides, he knows…
…it’s a scam. What he does care about is reallocating wealth to Dimocratic donors while at the same time lining the pockets of his own family.
Because I’ve written about Ukraine a lot over these past few months, and I’m neither an “it’s none of our business” isolationist nor a “let’s impose a no-fly-zone” interventionist, I suppose it’s possible my view can get foggy to some readers. So, here’s what I think, at least as of this morning:
We want Ukraine to repel the Russian invaders, or at least maximize the cost to Russia in blood and treasure, to discourage other autocrats and dictators with dreams of territorial acquisitions through military invasions.
In case anyone missed this point, we want to avoid the U.S. or our NATO allies getting into a shooting war with Russia!
Putin is likely to try to take advantage of the fact that we want to avoid a shooting war with Russia, rattling his saber, making threats, and demanding concessions. It is extremely important that the U.S. and NATO allies not make concessions to Putin, because this just encourages Putin and other autocrats to demand more. Never pay the Dane-Geld!
If we don’t want to send Ukraine those Polish MiG-29s because we think another anti-aircraft system will be just as effective, or because we’re not certain all of those Polish MiG-29s are battle-ready, or because it will take too much time to remove certain sensitive technology we don’t want to risk falling into Russian hands, fine. Let’s send Ukraine the weapons we think will be most useful to them in their present circumstances. But if we don’t want to send Ukraine those Polish MiG-29s because we think it would be too “provocative” or “escalatory,” we’re giving Vladimir Putin a veto over our actions. (FYI, while every little bit helps, these MiGs are 30 years old and hardly the straw to break the Russian invasion’s back.)
We must not start a fight with Russia, but we must be ready and willing to end a fight with Russia. This means clearly and directly communicating to Vladimir Putin that we have the will, and the means, to end a fight with Russia.
This means that we must clearly warn Russia that any aggression against a NATO ally would be met with an overwhelming response — conventional forces, cyberattacks, covert action, saboteurs, exposure of compromising information on Putin’s associates, you name it. We should emphasize that our response would not be “carefully measured” or “proportional,” lest that make some Russian military chiefs think they could withstand the blow. We should make it clear that our response would be wildly disproportional and inflict pain on the Russian government in ways it can’t even imagine. Instead of worrying about whether we’re provoking the Kremlin, we need to make the Kremlin fear the consequences of provoking us.
And considering Russia’s fairly low threshold for using tactical battlefield nukes, maybe we should be sending our own signals that we might respond to the use of tactical nuclear weapons with our own nonconventional response. We must make it clear to Putin that the use of nuclear weapons will not “escalate to deescalate,” it will only “escalate to escalate.
Here’s the juice: The view of NATO as a threat purportedly held by Putin and his generals notwithstanding, NATO is EXCLUSIVELY DEFENSIVE in nature, an alliance which can be called into action ONLY in the event of an attack on one of its members. NATO has never posed a threat to any nation; Or at least any nation which doesn’t have designs of the sovereign territory of another…which is only possible reason Putin might view it as a threat, and that only to his dreams of a reconstituted Soviet Union.
What should concern us most are the striking parallels between Putin and another dictator before him. First, like Hitler did with Germany, whether your average Ivan likes it or not, Putin’s placed Russia all in. Second, in Barbarossa, his detailed account of the Russo-German conflict of 1941-45, Alan Clark wrote of Hitler:
“So, feeling himself increasingly isolated, and uneasily conscious of the enormity of the forces he had roused outside of Germany in addition to the apprehension and discontent within her frontiers, Hitler stood completely alone. Alone in the sense that he was separated – Whether out of suspicion or distaste – from the company and influence (however transitory) of rational minds. The resultant vacuum was not filled, but contaminated by influences at the same time feverish and malignant.”
Putin’s presently in the same position. Which raises the legitimate concern Putin may well end up believing, as Hitler eerily predicted in 1934:
“Even if we could not conquer, we should drag half the world into destruction with us, and leave no-one to triumph over Germany…we shall never capitulate, no, never! We may be destroyed, but if we are we shall a drag a world with us – a world in flames.“
And remember, unlike der Führer, Mad Vlad has nukes…lots of nukes. All of which urges caution whatever we do, as well as makes us regret more than ever who’s at the helm of our ship of state:
“When great power nuclear dynamics are at play, a social media platform with a strict character limit may not be the best place to do your nuclear signaling.Yet on Friday afternoon, that is precisely what President Joe Biden did when he let loose an incredibly irresponsibletweet.
We are in the midst of a dangerous moment. Vladimir Putin has launched an unjustifiable hot war in Ukraine for reasons that are not entirely clear to anybody but the devil on his shoulder. The long peace in Europe is dead, stabbed in the heart while Putin looked it in the eye. The task now is to ensure that what replaces it is not a prolonged period of dangerous instability or, worse, a long, wider war characterized by unthinkable violence.
Enter President Biden with a tweet we can only hope will not be written about in the history books. “I want to be clear,” he wrote. “We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO.” So far, so good. Russia should have little doubt about American resolve to uphold its treaty commitments in Europe and to use all of the tools available to do so.
Unfortunately, the president then served up that doubt on a platter. “A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.” Will President Biden be willing to go to NATO Europe’s defense if he believes doing so would entail the outbreak of World War III, probably codeword for general nuclear war? Maybe. But the president has now given Putin ample reason to conclude that maybe not.
“We will defend every inch of NATO, and that will mean World War III, which we must avoid” — this is not the effective deterrent signaling the president thinks it is.
What’s more, it is not at all clear that Putin shares that same concern about World War III. Chinese leader Xi Jinping almost certainly doesn’t — Beijing believes geographically bounded conventional wars will be fought, as authoritative military documents put it, “under conditions of nuclear deterrence.” That imbalance in perceived consequences between President Biden and his potential adversaries gives those adversaries a leg up in the event of a conflict. They have plenty of room to escalate, whereas the American president’s approach to nuclear weapons seems to be something akin to “go big or go home” (at least as far as can be discerned on Twitter). The likes of Putin and Xi — both risk takers, and both apparently believers in a weakness inherent in supposed American decadence — may not see Biden’s threat of a third world war as particularly credible.
Ambiguity has an important role to play in nuclear deterrence. President Biden should not spell out exactly what he will and will not do in response to various potential hostile actions. There is value in keeping the enemy guessing, as uncertainty can have a deterrent value all its own. But rather than adopt measured ambiguity, the president undermined the very deterrent threat he sought to issue.
One hopes President Biden has not edged us closer to the very eventuality he aimed to forestall. On the other hand, a world war that has its origins in a tweet-inspired failure of nuclear deterrence would be remarkably appropriate for the current age.“
But nowadays, such irresponsible tweets…once the exclusive province of The Donald…are no longer emanating only from the Oval Office, as 46*’s #2 (in soooo many more ways than one!) recently offered this now-deleted bit of ill-advised info:
If brains were dynamite Biden couldn’t blow his nose…though Kommielaa might muster the energy to…well,…you know…Willie Brown.
Moving on, we offer another octet of items specially selected for inquiring Conservative minds.
(1). We’re with Derek Hunter when he states, all kidding aside, the Progressive mindset Is EVIL.
(3). The best defense being a good offense, Dr. Faux Chi is already formulating his plan of attack. We’re gonna go out on a limb and predict if, as is very likely, Republicans take back the House, this charlatan will conveniently choose to retire beyond the reach of any House investigation.
“…Smollett’s attorneys argued that the disgraced actor would have finished out his sentence by the time the appeal process had been completed and raised concerns that he could be in danger of physical harm if he remained in Cook County Jail…”
What…unlike every other inmate?!? Besides, given the two options facing convicted felons…
…since Jussie’s incapable of the former, and certainly won’t mind the latter, serving time should be a breeze for him.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Stuart Varney reveals why the Russians have become bogged down in Ukraine.
Tales of The Darkside
This clip provides insight into how Progressives think and view even the most horrific of events: Never let a good crisis go to waste.
On the Lighter Side
Here’s one way to empty your bait well on the way back from fishing.
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