It’s Friday, April 21st, 2023…but before we begin, John Fetterman’s first day at work didn’t go too well:
Still, we’d nominate Representative Pramila Jayapal as this week’s winner of the Joe Biden Award for the worst possible remark:
🤔 Jayapal using the tired old, “Who will clean our homes?” defense on illegal immigration. Limousine liberalism at its finest! #ampFWpic.twitter.com/LBMe4jrmxO
“The operations of the U.S. government are currently mildly impaired because three extremely old or otherwise visibly impaired lawmakers are being less than fully honest with the public about their health and conditions.
…Let’s begin with California senator Dianne Feinstein, who is 89 years old and turns 90 in June. She is recovering from shingles, and since the year began, has missed 79 percent of the votes taken in the Senate.
…Last year, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “The 88-year-old lawmaker is allegedly struggling to recognize colleagues and follow policy discussions.” The anecdotes were painfully familiar to anyone who has dealt with an elderly parent or grandparent losing their memory and growing increasingly confused
…Both ABC News and the Huffington Post are having flashbacks to the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s refusing to heed calls for her retirement while Democrats controlled the Senate. In 2013, then-president Barack Obama had lunch with Ginsburg and tried to gently prod her toward retirement, emphasizing “the looming 2014 midterm elections and how Democrats might lose control of the Senate.”
Of course, President Joe Biden cannot attempt to have a similar conversation with Feinstein, because the president is 80 years old, maintains a strikingly light schedule for a sitting president, intends to run for another term, and is in a condition where he rambles about how much he loves ice cream before he discusses a school shooting. If Biden were to tell Feinstein, “I think it’s best that you resign from your office, because you’re no longer in physical and mental state where you can adequately preform your duties,” Feinstein could well shoot back, “You first.”
I will remind you that Fetterman’s primary-care physician said in a public letter written in October 2022 that Fetterman “has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office.” Nearly six months later, it is now abundantly clear to anyone with eyes that Fetterman is in really rough shape, and everyone in America should hope for his full recovery. It is more than reasonable to ask if Fetterman or the people of Pennsylvania are best served by him remaining in office.
You can forgive Democrats for seething at the fact that they put in enormous effort to win a 51–49 majority in the Senate in last year’s midterms, only to have Feinstein and Fetterman out for so much of the year and giving them a 49–49 or 50–49 split.
Republicans shouldn’t chuckle too much, because they have their own share of geriatric senators and could well face a similar dilemma someday. Chuck Grassley of Iowa is 89, McConnell is 80, Jim Risch of Idaho is 79. At this point, all these senators seem to still have their marbles, but as we’ve seen with Feinstein, memory issues and confusion can worsen over time. The country would be better off if there were clearer “rules of the road” for when a lawmaker should retire, or when age becomes an impediment to a lawmaker’s ability to do his job. The country doesn’t have a 25th Amendment for positions besides the president and vice president, and while America has had plenty of elderly members of Congress, I suspect few ever expected we would reach this point, where senators who are so self-evidently impaired refuse to resign their seats.”
The revelation that for months the videogamer community was able to see highly classified intelligence documents allegedly pilfered from the U.S. government by a 20-something Air National Guardsman has repeatedly raised the question: How could this happen?
Maybe the better question for our times is: How could it not happen? The U.S. has become a country where fantastic events occur almost weekly. If there is a sense that some normalizing function isn’t working as it should, the answer may be found in a once-familiar word—accountability.
Begin with the sprawling U.S. national-security bureaucracy, from which 21-year old Jack Teixeira allegedly took documents relating to Ukraine’s war with Russia and sensitive U.S. intelligence-gathering on allies and enemies. He allegedly shared them on a gamer messaging platform called Discord—a grimly fitting label for our current moment. It’s becoming a bit much to have to listen to stern-faced Biden administration security officials at the White House or Pentagon do a doublespeak of concern about, for instance, a 200-foot-high Chinese spy balloon floating across the U.S., or now this extraordinary document leak. The mantras never change: We are monitoring the situation. We have procedures in place.
What we know for sure based on experience—Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden—is that the bureaucracies will wait out the story’s brief attention span and let calls for accountability evaporate.
To this day, the 9/11 commission report remains the classic account of bureaucracies that were too distracted, self-absorbed or siloed to connect the dots in front of their faces. It is hard to forget how in 2018, less than six weeks before Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla., a person close to him called the FBI tip line with information about Cruz’s erratic behavior, guns and troubling media posts. The tip was never forwarded to the bureau’s Miami office.
There seems to be a mysterious intersection in the documents leak between these gamers and a network of pro-Russian chat communities. The FBI is investigating a former U.S. Navy noncommissioned officer, Sarah Bils, who administered a social-media account called Donbass Devushka.
Mad magazine used to run a feature titled Spy vs. Spy. If there is a tarnished silver lining for the U.S., it is that our adversaries’ spies—witness the revelation Monday of Chinese police stations set up in New York City—are probably more bogged down in bureaucratic sludge than ours. A cynic would say the best hope is that the screw-ups net out in the U.S.’s favor.
What intrigues me about this story—because I think it has implications beyond the intelligence breach itself—is how Mr. Teixeira and his gamer pals for months seem to have made no distinction between their fantasy world of war and a real war in which Ukrainians are dying each day. One might have thought that as soon as it became clear that the documents were about such dangerously real events, they would have backed off. Instead, they incorporated lives at risk into their alternative world.
They aren’t the only ones unable to distinguish between the world’s realities and the unreal worlds in their heads. The story of Sam Bankman-Fried and his young coworkers at FTX in the Bahamas had a similar semi-real quality. Some of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s colleagues have confessed to crimes, but before that they all seem to have been incapable of distinguishing between the pedestrian realities of responsible money management and whatever loopy game they were playing with those now-gone billions.
Over two nights in downtown Chicago last weekend, teenage mobs rampaged through the streets, smashing cars. The event had been organized on social media. Three teenagers were shot. Indeed on any given weekend in Chicago and other cities, young men put bullets into other young men, apparently oblivious to the reality that a life has been extinguished. Surveying the wreckage, Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, the progressive Chicago’s voters just chose to run their city, said, “It is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
It is hard to overstate how over time the idea of being at fault for one’s actions has been explicitly diminished as a personal and legal norm, such that many people today have no recognition of being at fault for anything. That’s a bigger, more damaging national secret than these documents. In 1940, Walt Disney released the movie “Pinocchio” in which one of the characters sang a lyric memorized by youngsters for a generation: “Always let your conscience be your guide.” Today, no one would put a line so pitifully old-fashioned and unsophisticated in a movie for children.
We aren’t rediscovering the wheel here. It’s no revelation to say that when we began to devalue conscience (about 30 years after “Pinocchio”), blurring a pragmatic understanding of right from wrong, we were putting at risk a lot of psychologically vulnerable people. Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira had no idea what he was doing (Not certain we agree with that assessment!). He has a lot of company. They are the whirlwind that engulfs us now.
There’s still one aspect of this fiasco we don’t understand: Need to know. We once held a top-secret clearance, but it didn’t allow us to view classified material unless we had a need to know, i.e., that access to this classified material was necessary in the course of our duties. We cannot fathom how an Airman First Class, the third-lowest enlisted rank in the Air National Guard, could have a need to know about the combat situation in Ukraine, or the latest on the ChiCom’s hypersonic missile program.
Here’s the juice: In our view, the problem doesn’t lie as much with braindead gamers who can’t distinguish fantasy from reality, but the command structure that would allow them easy access…
…to such highly-sensitive material.
Since we’re on the subject of the highly-sensitive, the Journal‘s Kim Strassel records…
“The Donald Trump Rapid Reaction Machine primarily serves to produce Twitter and cable-TV drama. In the case of Mr. Trump’s reflexive defense of Disney, it’s providing the GOP an overdue opportunity to rethink its relationship with increasingly woke corporate America.
The surprise wasn’t that Mr. Trump dumped on Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor is angry that Disney quietly stripped his new board of its power to oversee the corporate kingdom. Mr. DeSantis this week escalated, promising more legislation to reassert authority and joking the state might build a prison next to Disney World. The press piled on, as did Mr. Trump—always eager to join a good kicking. An impulsive Truth Social jibe warned that Disney might flee the state, adding that this fight is “all so unnecessary, a political STUNT!”
The surprise is that it took this long for Mr. Trump’s disdain of his rival to land him crosswise with the base. There is a reason Mr. DeSantis is taking on woke Disney—Republican voters love it. So eager was Mr. Trump to join liberals on attack, he put himself on the side of a companythat disdains parental rights, axed the words “boys and girls” in park greetings, and just announced it would host the world’s largest LGBTQ+ conference. This is unlikely to sit well with conservative voters, and unlikely to be the only time Mr. Trump puts himself in this spot.
…An enterprising presidential aspirant might see the benefit of filling that space with a simple proposition: The GOP is cutting the corporate cord. It won’t weaponize government against business—yet neither will it coddle business. It will support broad-based free-market reforms, if primarily to support American’s millions of small businesses. But the days of lobbyists and elite corporate welfare—subsidies, tax credits, handouts—are over. The Fortune 500 never needed this help—and certainly don’t deserve it now. Just think of the taxpayer savings. Just think of the clarity.
Republican politicians who feel the need to do more might remember that—as in everything—real America does things better than government. Consumers are already punishing woke corporations—see Bud’s desperate new pro-America ad or Disney’s operating losses. Maybe the party of free markets can trust the free market to work.
Americans celebrate entrepreneurship; they despise special corporate treatment. Republicans might try joining them in what is a quite straightforward—and refreshing—position.”
We should point out Trump has never been above launching irresponsible, utterly unsupportable personal attacks, as evidenced by his diatribe against Virginia governor Glen Youngkin:
Sorry, but the more this self-absorbed moron speaks and writes at the level of a 2nd-grader, the more we find ourselves wishing for him to step in front of a bus between now and November.
Then there’s this from The Daily Signal, as Jarrett Stepman details how…
Failing to Create a Brotherhood of Man, the UN Promotes Sex With Children
“Sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual in fact, if not in law.” So says a March report released by the United Nations. In simpler terms, the U.N. is saying that minors can consent to sex, and that this is a human right.
This tweet by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts gets even more to the point.
Truly disgusting stuff.
…Generations of failure to prevent wars, the inclusion of authoritarian regimes on the U.N. Human Rights Council, and various other follies have turned the U.N. into the punchline that it’s always been.
That doesn’t mean that the United Nations doesn’t still do genuinely awful things and demonstrate how terrible one-world governance would be under this noxious organization. Squabbling, wasting time, and generally being ignored might be the best aspects of the current U.N.
“Principle 16” of the global body’s March report, released for International Women’s Day, lays out the basis for what the U.N. considers “consensual sexual conduct.” It says:
The enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them. Pursuant to their evolving capacities and progressive autonomy, persons under 18 years of age should participate in decisions affecting them, with due regard to their age, maturity, and best interests, and with specific attention to non-discrimination guarantees.
While not quite declaring outright that it’s a human right for adults to have sex with minors, the U.N. report suggests that a law preventing such a relationship is a violation of a child’s right to have sex with whomever the child wants. “The U.N. report echoes the thinking of groups like the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which condones pedophilia and works to abolish age-of-consent laws,” Adam Kredo wrote in The Washington Free Beacon. “While the report stops short of calling for the legalization of sex with minors, it maintains that those under 18 years of age have the mental capacity to willingly have sex with older individuals.”
The report is particularly disturbing given that the U.N. has been ensnared in several scandals involving child sex rings in recent years. In 2017, The Associated Press reported on such scandals in Haiti. “The men who came from a far-away place and spoke a strange language offered the Haitian children cookies and other snacks. Sometimes they gave them a few dollars,” AP reported. “But the price was high: The Sri Lankan peacekeepers wanted sex from girls and boys as young as 12.” It gets worse:
An Associated Press investigation of U.N. missions during the past 12 years found nearly 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other personnel around the world—signaling the crisis is much larger than previously known. More than 300 of the allegations involved children, the AP found, but only a fraction of the alleged perpetrators served jail time.
Is the United Nations now trying to justify evil behavior by its personnel?
The U.N. report includes other disturbing aspects besides the implications for children. It suggests that the criminalization of any sexual activity is a violation of human rights. In a preview of the report, the U.N. laments that “over 150 countries criminalize some aspect of sex work.”
Oh no! Nothing says “progress” and defense of women like massively increasing and decriminalizing prostitution. Human rights leaders at the U.N. are extremely excited about how these initiatives decriminalizing sex work could wreck the patriarchy. “Today is an opportunity for all of us to think about power and male-dominated systems,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said upon release of the report March 8, which is International Women’s Day.
Yes, perhaps we should. Keep in mind, the United States currently pays for about 22% of the U.N. budget, thanks in large part to funding increases under President Joe Biden.
Instead of international peace, the global organization has provided a megaphone for tyrants, soaked up endless taxpayer dollars, and swept serious scandals under the rug while promoting genuinely awful values around the world. So much for the U.N.’s ushering in a brotherhood of man. Instead, it’s dedicated to helping adults prey on children under the guise of “human rights.”
This from the same organization which assures us our planet is doomed unless Western nations kill their economies, transition to a an utterly unachievable green energy future and eat bugs.
Were we elected President, one of our first acts would be to withdraw from the U.N. and boot the entire organization off U.S. soil.
Moving on, here’s another septet of special selection certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). The Journal‘s Editorial Board relates why the Tennessee Bullhorn isn’t democracy, Biden’s and Schumer’s claim it’s now heroic to disrupt a legislative proceeding notwithstanding.
(3). In a related item, another George Soros-bankrolled prosecutor in St. Louis already facing a legal effort by Missouri’s attorney general to fire her for allegedly neglecting her duties may also be held in criminal contempt of court after no one from her office showed up for a murder trial, adding further fuel to the push to oust her. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, a Democrat, is fighting to hold onto her position as Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, seeks to remove her from office, claiming the city’s top prosecutor isn’t enforcing the law or protecting public safety.
(5). Townhall.com’s Sarah Arnold details how even as far back as 2016, a popular history textbook described The Donald as a “sexual predator” without any supporting details, while simultaneously describing Bill Clinton’s repeated accusations of rape and sexual assault as “merely dogged by a scandal.”
“According to the Utah County Sheriff’s Office, a detective was assigned to investigate the Lehi Farmers Market, because it was reported to be operating in violation of state code and zoning ordinances. During the investigation, detectives found that one of the operators of the Lehi Farmers Market is Larry Neff Jarvis, 74, who is a registered sex offender on the Utah Sex Offender Registry, the sheriff’s office said.
Officials say that while the registry lists Jarvis as living in Saratoga Springs, Utah, detectives learned that he actually lives at the location of the farmers market, but failed to update his address.
…According to the sheriff’s office, activities at the farmers market are oriented around children, including a petting zoo and tractor rides.”
Who does Jarvis think he is: Joe Biden?!?
Oh, ICYMI, this kid, likely facing assault charges, takes bad sportsmanship to another level:
Disgusting footage from #wrestling match in Des Plaines, Illinois.
Here is Hafid Alicea (Maine West HS) SUCKER PUNCHING Cooper Corder (SPAR Wrestling Academy) after losing 14-2.
Even worse, he fakes a hand shake and then floors Corder after their Freestyle match for 3rd place. pic.twitter.com/UryZ3O5P1M
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