The Daily Gouge Archive, Monday, March 21st 2022

On March 22, 2022, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Monday, March 21st, 2022…but before we begin, a forward from the lovely Shannon exposes the complete paucity of Progressives’ promotion of mental illness as legitimate form of self-expression:

If Will Thomas is a woman…

…Michelle Obama is an unabashed supporter of truth, justice and the American way as set down in writing by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.

Here’s the juice, in the form of a meme forwarded by Balls Cotton:

Here’s hoping The Left’s unabashed support of such an obvious exhibition of insanity…

…marks the end of America’s tolerance of their deviant social engineering.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, Jim Geraghty accurately assesses how the…

Ukraine Crisis Exposes the Impotence of International Bodies

In a Crisis, Big International Institutions Falter

“Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, delivering a virtual address to the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, stated a hard truth plainly: “The wars of the past have prompted our predecessors to create institutions that should protect us from war, but they, unfortunately, don’t work. We see it. You see it. So we need new ones, new institutions, new alliances, and we offer them.”

It feels like a long time ago, but it is easy to forget that less than a month ago, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began as the United Nations Security Council met to discuss and denounce it. The security-council meeting was chaired by Russian ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, because the month of February was Russia’s turn in the rotation. One by one, security-council ambassadors denounced the invasion . . . and then nothing happened. This is how that meeting ended:

“There is no purgatory for war criminals,” [Ukraine’s ambassador, Sergiy] Kyslytsya said. “They go straight to hell, ambassador.”

After a bit of silence, Russia’s ambassador responded calmly.

“We aren’t being aggressive against the Ukrainian people, but against the junta in power in Kyiv,” he said.

He then announced the meeting adjourned.

Think about it: The U.N. didn’t even have a mechanism or the will to decide that the Russian ambassador shouldn’t be allowed to chair the emergency meeting about how to respond to Russia invading Ukraine. The institution is so obsessed with protocol and avoiding an accusation of being unfair that it shrugs helplessly as the guy representing the invading country declares the meeting over.

Then on March 2, the U.N. overwhelmingly voted for a resolution demanding that Russia “immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.” And again, nothing happened.

The United Nations doesn’t have the power to enact any economic sanctions on its own. The U.N. doesn’t have an army capable of forcing Russia out of Ukraine. The U.N. has peacekeeping forces, but they are frustratingly ineffective, infuriatingly corrupt, and have a jaw-droppingly horrific problem with the sexual abuse of the populations they’re supposed to be protecting.

Back in 2019, the American Foreign Service Association published an excerpt of the book, Why Peacekeeping Fails, by Dennis Jett, a former U.S. ambassador to Peru and Mozambique who also worked in U.S. embassies in Argentina, Israel, Malawi, and Liberia.

Jett did not mince words:

The most recently launched peacekeeping missions will therefore fail, because U.N. peacekeeping has become a way for rich countries to send the soldiers of poor countries to deal with conflicts the rich countries do not care all that much about. The fundamental problem is that there is no peace to keep, and U.N. forces are incapable of imposing one because they are peacekeepers and not warfighters. If the international community wants to try to impose a peace, it should send troops that are capable and willing to do that.

The United Nations is largely irrelevant to the world’s biggest problems. When push comes to shove, it’s an impotent debating society that fails to pay its parking tickets.

To give credit where it’s due, international-relief agencies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Save the Children, and the U.N. World Food Program, among many others, are responding quickly to help desperate refugees and victims in Ukraine. Maybe big international institutions can work when the task is straightforward and a matter of logistics: getting aid to those who need it.

But beyond that, score one for the nationalists: When a really important task needs to get done, it’s usually a national government that makes it happen. The sanctions that are devastating the Russian economy are being enacted by individual nations. Individual NATO countries are shipping arms and supplies to the Ukrainians. Individual nations’ police forces are seizing those oligarchs’ yachts.

Meanwhile, two years after the Covid-19 pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt and turned everyone’s lives upside down, the World Health Organization is still begging the Chinese government to cooperate more in probes about how the pandemic began…”

The United Nations: Useless as the proverbial…

Since we’re on the subject of the utterly useless, the Journal reports Biden has warned China’s Xi of “consequences” if Beijing supports Russia on Ukraine. We can only imagine the conversation went something like this:

Since we’re on the subject of Socialists and their predisposition to prevaricate, NRO‘s Judson Berger provides us a partial list of…

Sergey Lavrov’s Lies

“For the better part of two decades, Russia’s top diplomat has done whatever the opposite of ingratiating is to seat himself at the most exclusive tables of global affairs. Sergey Lavrov, by dint of sickle-sharp messaging, forged a reputation as a rival worthy of grudging respect. Here he is with Rice, with Clinton, with Kerry, with Pompeo, with Blinken . . . the constant counterpart across four U.S. administrations.

Profiles of the formidable diplomatic figure painted a complex portrait, discussing his fondness for poetry, his proficiency in multiple languages, and the intellectual heft he brought to bear as foreign minister.

The Washington Post wrote in 2014:

Personally, his dominating physical appearance — he’s known for his height and his athletic ability — is tempered by reports of his softer side that focuses on his apparent love of writing poetry (though he has also been reported to be a big fan of more macho pursuits such as buying Italian suits, Scotch whisky and smoking).

People respect him, even if they don’t like him.

Today, Sergey Lavrov draws inspiration not from Jonathan Goldsmith but some combination of the RMVP, Ri Chun-hee, and Baghdad Bob. His stature as a respected adversary is or should be, in all the aftermath of the February 24 invasion of Ukraine, irrevocably shattered.

You may have seen this quote from Mr. Lavrov: “We are not planning to attack other countries. We didn’t attack Ukraine in the first place.”

Okay. Then there was his response to the maternity-hospital bombing in Mariupol that produced a horrible image of a bleeding pregnant woman on a stretcher (her baby died, the mother is reported to have told the medics to “kill me now,” and then she died). Lavrov’s line was that Ukrainian radicals were using the hospital as a base and that patients had been moved out of the building before the strike, while a Russian embassy asserted the images were simply faked and echoed Lavrov’s claims. The foreign minister also has referred to components of the Ukrainian army as “Nazi battalions” and said the country’s Jewish president is being manipulated by “neo-Nazis.”

Lavrov is not merely bending the truth in his defense of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. He (like Brandon) has no relation to it. The two (like Kommielaa) have never met. His performance should ensure he never again wins an audience with an American official.

This amoral poetic polyglot is only the most prolific liar in the Kremlin’s operation. But the West must not forget the inhumanity of his falsehoods. The mendacity matters more immediately as U.S. policy-makers worry whether their own actions could be used by Vladimir Putin as justification to escalate. As Jim Geraghty writes, Putin does not need justification. He can create his own and often does…”

Does is surprise anyone both the State Department and MSM totally misread Lavrov’s character?

In a related item, consider this intriguing segment of Zeihan on Geopolitics relating the impact of demographics on Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine forwarded by Balls Cotton:

Next, speaking of people Americans should henceforth consider persona non grata, Charlie Cooke echoes a position we’ve taken repeatedly: Both Conservatives and Republicans need to say…

No to Trump in 2024

The GOP does not lack for better options. So why should we put ourselves through all that again?

“Donald Trump hasn’t said for sure whether he will run in 2024,” reports NPR. “But he’s having a hell of a lot of fun teasing it.”

Donald Trump? In 2024? Why on earth would conservatives choose that guy?

I’m serious: Why? Why would we do that when we have a choice? The idea should be absurd, risible, farcical, outré. It should be a punchline, a mania, the preserve of the demented fringe. Politics matters. And because politics matters, it is a bad idea to allow politics to be held hostage by someone who, in his heart of hearts, doesn’t really care. Donald Trump is an extraordinarily selfish man, and he is only too happy to subordinate your interests to his own. Why let him? It is one thing to say, “Well, he may have been a fickle boor, but I liked some of what he did once he was in office”; it’s quite another to put yourself through four more years of the man when you don’t have to. Whatever justification there may have been for picking the “lesser of two evils” in the 2016 or 2020 general election — a justification that was a great deal stronger before Trump refused to accept, and then tried to overturn, the results of the latter — it cannot obtain in 202[4].

Don’t tell me: Because I’m responding to Trump’s repeated hints, I must be “obsessed” or “deranged” or “jealous.” Or, perhaps, I “want Joe Biden to be president.” Well, no, actually, I don’t. But regardless, Biden is not going to be on the ballot in the next Republican presidential primaries, is he? General elections can be complicated because they require the public to decide whether it wants the Republican or the Democrat, both of whom have already been nominated by their respective parties. But primaries? Primaries are different. In the next Republican primary, the question will be, “Given a free choice, who do you want to run against Joe Biden?” My answer will be, “A Republican who is likely to win — and who, if he wins, will not be an insane mess.” Is that not yours?

It sure as shootin’ is ours, as our top three choices to headline the 2024 Republican ticket as of today are:

Moving on, here’s a quartet of specially-selected items certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:

(1). NRO tells us New York City’s new health commissioner announced Friday the private employer vaccine mandate and the school mask mandate imposed on children five-and-under will remain in place indefinitely. As our Quote of the Day and accompanying meme at the top of the page confirm, it’s all about the control: They just can’t let it go.

(2). A California Chick-fil-A may be declared “a public nuisance“, as the restaurant, located in Santa Barbara, has been so tremendously popular since it opened in 2013 drive-thru customers who don’t fit on-site queue up in the adjacent roadway, blocking traffic and causing accidents on a regular basis. Proving, though failure always carries costs, sometimes too does success.

(3). In a victory, albeit it temporary, for the future of the First Amendment, Ed Hickey forwarded word from the Independent Journal Review a judge found North Texas State officials violated the free speech rights of math professor Nathaniel Hiers when they fired him for going public with his disagreement with the left-wing concept of “migroaggressions” and refusing “supplemental diversity training”:

“The university was claiming qualified immunity for school officials in the case, meaning that the school wanted its officials to be excluded from being held responsible for their actions merely because they were acting in their position as state employees. Jordan denied the claim of qualified immunity and also denied the school’s demand to have the case dismissed outright.”

Sorry, but few things thrill our heart as much as the thought of woke university administrators being held personally liable for their politically-correct, unconstitutional edicts.

(4). Andy McCarthy informs us what Republicans can do about Biden’s Russia-engineered Iran Nuclear Deal II. Spoiler Alert: It’s not a helluva lot beyond what Republicans seem to do best, which is orate and bloviate. And though the question occurred to us why an expedited appeal to the SCOTUS on the basis of separations of powers might not be possible, he’s Andy McCarthy…and we’re not. Only time will tell.

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side: