| From: Joachim K | 11/13/2022 10:46:01 PM | | | | | | State Department stonewalls investigation into how it spent $1,100,000,000 in Afghanistan since Taliban took over
NOV 13, 2022 4:00 PM
BY ROBERT SPENCER
8 COMMENTS
What are they hiding? To whom did this money go? We will likely never know, because the people who would hold the State Department accountable are just as corrupt as the State Department, and on the same side.
“White House Won’t Say How It Spent $1 Billion in Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan,” by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, November 11, 2022:
The State Department says it will not comply with a government watchdog’s investigation into how more than $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds was spent in Afghanistan since the Taliban terror group retook control of the country.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction ( SIGAR), a government watchdog established in 2008 to perform oversight on America’s $146 billion reconstruction project in the war-torn country, announced that for the first time in its history, the State and Treasury Departments will not comply with its investigations.
“SIGAR, for the first time in its history, is unable this quarter to provide Congress and the American people with a full accounting of this U.S. government spending due to the non-cooperation of U.S. agencies,” the watchdog disclosed in its latest report to Congress. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which allocates American aid, “and the Treasury Department refused to cooperate with SIGAR in any capacity, while the State Department was selective in the information it provided pursuant to SIGAR’s audit and quarterly data requests.”
SIGAR says the Biden administration’s refusal to cooperate with its investigation into the allocation of $1.1 billion in taxpayer funds since the Taliban regained power constitutes a “direct violation” of the watchdog group’s congressional mandate. The administration also is withholding evidence related to the collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government, as well as information about whether the State Department is complying with laws prohibiting the transfer of American funds to the Taliban. “No federal agency has challenged SIGAR’s authority to conduct oversight of such programs until now,” the watchdog agency said…. |
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| From: Joachim K | 11/13/2022 10:47:57 PM | | | | | | At Climate Summit, Elites Chow Down on Gourmet Meats While Telling Us to Eat Bugs
NOV 13, 2022 6:00 AM
BY ROBERT SPENCER
5 COMMENTS
New in PJ Media:
George Carlin said it years ago: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think, and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.”
Need proof? Check out the United Nations’ big COP27 climate summit that is going on in Egypt right now, attended by Old Joe Biden and other alleged world leaders: while telling us to eat bugs, they are dining on the most sumptuous fare imaginable. Are they so secure in their elite status that they can flaunt it in front of our faces without fear of adverse electoral consequences? Sure looks that way.
The UK’s Daily Mail reported Monday that “officials who land a spot at the conference’s exclusive VIP restaurant will be able to dine out on an array of pricey meat and fish dishes served up during the 12-day climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh this week. Those with a taste for the luxurious can snap up an angus beef medallion with sautéed potatoes for a pricey $100 (£90) or a creamy salmon for $40 (£35), after scoffing back a $50 (£43) seafood platter for starter.” Hypocrisy? Off the charts.
These are the same people, mind you, who want us to eat bugs. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) declares: “Edible insects contain high quality protein, vitamins and amino acids for humans. Insects have a high food conversion rate, e.g. crickets need six times less feed than cattle, four times less than sheep, and twice less than pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein.”
This isn’t just abstract speculation. As far back as 2013, the UN was trying to sell this disgusting notion: “While the idea of eating a worm, grasshopper or cicada at every meal may seem strange, FAO says this has many health benefits. Insects are high in protein, fat and mineral contents. They can be eaten whole or ground into a powder or paste, and incorporated into other foods. ‘Insects are not harmful to eat, quite the contrary. They are nutritious, they have a lot of protein and are considered a delicacy in many countries,’ said Eva Muller, the Director of FAO’s Forest Economics, Policy and Products Division.”
There is more. Read the rest here. |
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| From: Joachim K | 11/13/2022 10:49:05 PM | | | | | | Biden Threatens ‘Transformational’ Change at UN Summit
NOV 12, 2022 3:00 PM
BY DANIEL GREENFIELD
15 COMMENTS
It’s transforming us from a prosperous nation to a poor one.
World leaders, activists and organization leaders jetted over to Egypt, a fantastically polluted county, for the COP27 United Nations summit, to save the planet.
If only someone would save the planet from them.
“My friends, I came to the presidency determined to make … transformational changes that are needed, that America needs to make and we have to do for the rest of the world, to overcome decades of opposition and obstacles of progress on this issue alone,” Biden threatened
With high fuel prices at the pump, runaway inflationary spending, like using the Inflation Increase Act to finance corrupt green energy policies, we can see those “transformational” policies underway.
With American energy production dropping sharply due to Biden policies, he touted new plans to depress our energy economy even further by allowing anti-energy leftist activists to partner with the EPA to go after oil and gas companies over so-called ‘methane leaks’.
Additionally Biden intends to further redefine our economy around carbon metrics by forcing federal contractors to adopt carbon targets. This further embeds ESG into our economy and forces us to live by the rationing of the carbon footprint.
This is transformational. It’s transforming us from a prosperous nation to a poor one and from a nation of free people to a cult of ESG slaves. |
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| From: Joachim K | 11/13/2022 10:49:33 PM | | | | | | Confused Biden Heads to Cambodia, Thinks He’s in Colombia
NOV 13, 2022 7:00 AM
BY ROBERT SPENCER
2 COMMENTS
New in PJ Media:
Old Joe Biden first said it on the South Lawn on Thursday, right after he said: “Look, I don’t think the conflict will be resolved with Russia and Ukraine until Ukraine gets out of —” Whoops! “Until Putin gets out of Ukraine.” He followed that one with yet another: “Anyway, you guys, I’m heading down to — first of all, going to Cairo for the — for the environmental effort, then heading over to Colombia and then — I mean, Cambodia. I was thinking — I’m thinking the Western Hemisphere.”
Yeah, that explains it. Except in Phnom Penh on Saturday, Old Joe did it again: “And I want to thank the Prime Minister of — for Colombia’s leadership in the ASEAN — as ASEAN chair and for hosting all of us.” Does the ostensible president of the United States have any idea where he is at any given time?
Now, you might think that the old man should be cut some slack on this one since both countries start and end with the same letters and have the same number of syllables. But it’s embarrassing enough in itself that we have to resort to rationalizations of this kind so very frequently in order to cover for the statements of the man who is supposed to be president of the United States. After all, the dementia-ridden Chief Executive makes errors like this all the time with a frequency that has made them commonplace and largely not even worth mentioning. The Washington Free Beacon reported Friday that “This week, for example, the sludge-brained commander in chief touted his efforts to ‘quote: help turbocharge’ the ‘clean enerny’ economy, and slammed critics who accused him of being ‘apalapakehpakapakacapa.’”
So why is he still the Chief Executive at all? It was widely expected that after the shellacking the Democrats were expected to get in the midterms, Biden’s handlers would finally pack him off to his walled Delaware beach house and hand the keys to the Oval Office over to Kamala Harris, so as to situate the Cackler as a smooth, experienced president ready in 2024 for a term of her own. But the red wave dissipated into a ripple at best, and Old Joe is buoyant, crowing that he was going to maintain the disastrous America-Last policies of the first two years of his administration: “I’m not going to change anything in any fundamental way.”
After the Democrats did so unexpectedly well in the midterms, it will be much harder for the people who are running this administration to put Old Joe out to pasture. But he reminded us all Wednesday that he is still not the man in charge, saying at one of his show press conferences: “Now, I’ve been given a list of 10 people that I’m supposed to call on.”
There is more. Read the rest here. |
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| From: Joachim K | 11/13/2022 10:50:22 PM | | | | | | Iran Lashes Out, Warns UK to Stop Coverage of Protests
NOV 13, 2022 10:00 AM
BY HUGH FITZGERALD
3 COMMENTS
Like a wounded animal, Iran’s government is lashing out wildly. It’s no longer just America, the Great Satan, and Israel, the Little Satan, that worry the regime in Tehran. The protests by Iranians keep on, and they are getting larger, despite the Basij and police using live fire against the protesters. So far, nearly 400 protesters have been killed, including 50 women and 35 children. Protesters are not intimidated. They have engaged in a new sport, knocking the turbans off the heads of clerics, as a sign of contempt for, and rage against, the theocrats who have ruled Iran since 1979. Iran’s doctors have joined the protests en masse; they are treating wounded protesters, and in so doing, risk their own lives. Students at 130 Iranian universities have gone out on strike against the regime. Shopkeepers (bazaaris), workers at oil and gas rigs, and in the steel industry, have now gone out on strike in solidarity with the protesters. It all started with the death of Mahsa Amini and the tearing off of hijabs. Now the protests are about much more than the mistreatment of women by the morality police; they now pointedly call into question the regime’s very existence. The crowds now chant, not “woman, life, freedom” but, more ominously for the rulers, “Death to the Islamic Republic!” and “Death to the Dictator!”
The regime wants to shut down the sources of information about the protests that are now broadcast into Iran by Iran International, a station run in London by Iranian exiles. It has been, and may still be, financed by Saudi nationals. Hence the threats from Iran being made against the U.K., an addition to the threats constantly being made by the regime in Tehran against the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The Iran wants the British government to shut down Iran International. That, of course, won’t happen. More on the Iranian regime’s latest threats can be found here: “Iranian official threatens UK over coverage of ongoing protests,” by Tzvi Joffre, Jerusalem Post, November 9, 2022:
Iran’s Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib claimed that the UK was leading “propaganda” efforts and feeding the ongoing protests sweeping Iran since the killing of Mahsa Amini by Iranian “morality police,” in statements on Tuesday.
Khatib complained that the US, UK, Israel and Saudi Arabia had conducted “the greatest ‘influence operation’ on a country taken to destabilize that country and create unrest in it through hybrid warfare.”
The only thing that the US, UK, and Israel have done is broadcast the truth about the protests to the people of Iran. Nothing else – no “propaganda” – need be broadcast, and none is. The truth itself is horrifying enough. Whether it is the BBC Persian Service, the VOA’s Persian service, or Israel’s state-run radio (that has been broadcasting programs in Farsi for the last 50 years), they are all in the business of getting the truth to Iranians. Saudi Arabia is also a danger to Tehran because its nationals have provided the early financing for Iran International, run by Iranian exiles in London.
The minister [Esmail Khatib] pointed to Israel as the main factor in “implementation,” saying that “in terms of propaganda, England’s role was clearer.” Khatib added that Saudi Arabia was funding the alleged “influence operation” as well.
Khatib is right to blame the U.K. both for the BBC Persian Service, which broadcasts not “propaganda,” but even more dangerous for the Tehran regime, the truth about what’s going on inside Iran, and provides a secure home for the headquarters of Iran International, broadcasting from London. It is Iran International, with its network of informants reporting to it from all over Iran, that enables a resident of Iranian Kurdistan, for example, to find out what has been happening in Khuzestan or Tehran, and allows someone in Mashhad or Qom to find out about the latest massacre in Baluchistan. Information about both the continuing protests and the violent response by the government is sent surreptitiously by correspondents inside Iran to Iran International, which then beams those reports back into Iran. Iran International now has a 33% share of the Iranian radio audience. No wonder the regime is in a rage with the U.K. for hosting this dangerous purveyor of truth.
“Unlike England, we will never support acts of terrorism and the creation of insecurity in other countries,” said Khatib. “However, we also have no obligation to prevent insecurity in those countries either. Therefore, England will pay for the measures it has taken to try to make Iran insecure.”
“Unlike England, we will never support acts of terrorism.” Minister of Intelligence Esmail Khatib appears to have forgotten Iran’s support, with money and weapons, to two terror groups, Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran is the greatest supporter of terrorism in the world today; it has been expanding into South America, where its agents have supported Hezbollah’s two biggest terrorist attacks, one the bombing in Buenos Aires of the Argentinian Israelite Mutual Association in 1994, and the other the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in the same city in 1992. Iran has been expanding its operations, too, in West Africa, where recruits for Hezbollah, and thus for its puppet-master Iran, have been found among the groups of Lebanese Shi’a traders who have long been settled in the area.
Khatib additionally threatened the Iran International news network, based in London, calling it a “terrorist organization” and warning that its “operatives” would be pursued by Iranian intelligence. It was unclear if the minister was threatening to attack reporters in the UK.
“From here on, any kind of connection with this terrorist organization will be considered to be tantamount to entering the field of terrorism and a threat to national security,” warned the minister.
Khatib ridiculed Saudi Arabia for its alleged support of the protests in Iran, stating “our fate and that of other countries in the region are tied together due to our neighborhood.”
“From Iran’s point of view, any instability in the countries of the region is contagious, and any instability in Iran can be contagious to the countries of the region,” said the minister. “Faraway countries [America, the U.K.]are the destabilizers of the region. Throwing stones at powerful Iran by countries sitting in glass houses has no meaning other than crossing the borders of rationality into the darkness of stupidity.”
The threat expressed by Minister Khatib to Saudi Arabia, is clear. ”If we suffer from instability, then the Kingdom, too, should expect to suffer the same fate.” The instability is “contagious” only because Iran will make sure to spread it. What can Iran do to “destabilize” Saudi Arabia? First, it can provide the Houthis in Yemen with more armed drones to use against Saudi oil facilities and airbases, as the Houthis have already done in the past. Second, it can stir up trouble in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, where all of the country’s oil is located – and so are almost all of the country’s 3.5 million Shia, who might be susceptible to Iranian broadcasts detailing all the ways they were savagely suppressed in 2011 and 2012, and the bad blood between Shia and Sunni in the Kingdom has only worsened. If Iran has a mind to really stir up trouble, it could whip up, with its own broadcasts, anti-Saudi sentiments among that country’s Shi’a. Iran could also smuggle across the Gulf both money and weapons to the Shia in the Eastern Province. It is to this that Esmail Khatib alludes when he warns that “instability” in the region can be “contagious.”
Khatib additionally warned that Iran would not guarantee the continuation of “strategic patience” towards Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region amid what he called “the continuation of hostilities.
“Undoubtedly, if the will of the Islamic Republic of Iran is given to reciprocate and punish these countries, the glass palaces will collapse and these countries will not see stability.”
Iranian media has referred to Iran International as a “Saudi” news outlet, and IRGC officials have warned Saudi Arabia to “control” media outlets it deems as “promoting mischief” and “provoking” Iranian youth.
The Saudis are not about to rein in or censor the broadcasts — far less than what is broadcast about Iran on the BBC, VOA, and Israeli Persian-language stations — on their own television and radio stations about Iran. And even if they had wanted to, the Saudis could not now shut down, or censor, broadcasts from Iran International. That London-based station owed its existence initially to Saudi money, but now is believed to be under strictly Iranian (exile) ownership. Iran is the Kingdom’s mortal enemy; the Saudis take great comfort in the nationwide protests that are destabilizing the Islamic Republic. The warnings from the IRGC to the Saudis to “control” their media are futile. And what can Iran do to the Kingdom, other than what it is already doing, by encouraging Houthi drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities? If Iran itself – not the Houthis — were to hit Saudi Arabia directly, it won’t be the Saudis responding, but the Great Satan. A recent incident made this clear:
Last week, Saudi Arabia warned the US that there was an “imminent attack” being planned by Iran against targets in Iraqi Kurdistan and Saudi Arabia, prompting the US and other countries to raise their alert level, according to Western media. The US reportedly launched fighter jets towards Iran in response to the threats.
When no Iranian drones were launched, the planes turned back. But the incident showed American willingness to take on Iran directly, if need be. The U.S. cannot tolerate any further reduction in Saudi oil output, and will defend Saudi oil installations against any perceived threat from Iran – like the ones just made by Minister of Intelligence Khatib.
Iran International will continue to broadcast, its staff clearly unintimidated, from London. The Metro police will beef up security around the broadcasters’ headquarters and homes. Iran’s warnings to Saudi Arabia to censor Iran International’s broadcasts are pointless; Saudi nationals no longer own the station. Nor can the Iranians hope to frighten the three other main sources of truthful news about their country, that have a huge Iranian audience:: the Farsi-language services of the BBC, the VOA, and Israel’s national radio. The protests will continue to be covered; the murderers, ands, and the murderers, will be named. Iran will continue to flail and to threaten, but to no avail. In Iran, the protesters are shouting “Death to the Dictator1” The girls and women are still burning their hijabs. The Kurds and Baluchis are now chanting separatist slogans, causing tremors in Tehran. And now clerics are having their turbans knocked off. La lutte continue. |
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| From: Joachim K | 11/13/2022 10:51:12 PM | | | | | | Former State Department official says new Iran deal would be disaster for the U.S. and for the Iranian people
NOV 13, 2022 5:00 PM
BY ROBERT SPENCER
2 COMMENTS
That does not at all mean that Biden’s handers won’t continue to pursue it when they calculate that they can do so with minimal political damage.
“Fmr State Dept Spox: Iran Nuclear Deal Dead as Anti-Regime Protests Surge,” by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, November 11, 2022:
The Biden administration’s negotiations over a revamped version of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal are dead as the result of massive anti-regime protests that have swept across the Islamic Republic, according to the former Trump administration’s State Department spokeswoman.
“I don’t see any room or any space for [the administration] to build back into” the long-stalled negotiations, Morgan Ortagus, who served under former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, said during a panel discussion Friday afternoon at the Richard Nixon Foundation’s Grand Strategy Summit in Washington, D.C. “It would be a political disaster in the U.S. and a disaster for the people of Iran who are rejecting this regime.”
How could the Biden administration “financially empower the very oppressors of the women and teenagers we’re supposed to be standing up for and standing with?” Ortagus asked….
Upon entering office, President Joe Biden’s team “didn’t have a plan for Iran except for going back into the JCPOA,” the official acronym for the Iran deal, Ortagus said. If the administration had been able to finalize another “weak and pathetic deal,” Ortagus said that around three-fourths of the Senate would have rejected it. Iran, she added, “played [Biden] for 18 months” and “I don’t see any strategy” going forward.
Jon Alterman, a former State Department official who heads the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank, pushed back on Ortagus’s assessment. He said the Trump administration’s so-called maximum pressure campaign on Tehran—which included the toughest sanctions regime in history—failed because U.S. allies were not on board.
It is “deeply mistaken and perhaps dishonest to argue the Biden admin thought the JCPOA was going to fix Iran,” Alterman said. “Our record of changing governments and putting something better in their place is pretty checkered.”
Alterman said he agrees with the Biden administration’s response to the anti-regime protest movement in Iran.
“The Biden administration actually has been walking a reasonable line to criticize the Iranian government for its abuses, but to be careful not to speak for the protesters, not to advocate for the protesters.”… |
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| From: Joachim K | 11/13/2022 10:53:52 PM | | | | | | It Isn't Cognitive Dissonance; It's Doublethink
BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, NOV 13, 2022 - 09:00 PM
Authored by Thorsteinn Siglaugsson via 'From Symptoms to Causes' Substack,
Cognitive dissonance is when people feel discomfort due to discrepancies in their own thoughts or beliefs.
As an example, someone who takes pride in being honest, feels such discomfort when he tells a lie.
Another example of cognitive dissonance is the discomfort felt by members of a cult when they seek to explain how the end of the world was postponed, as their apocalyptic prophecy did not come true.
The term was in fact coined by psychologist Leon Festinger in his studies of such cults in the 1950s.
The opposite of cognitive dissonance is doublethink, a word that first appeared in George Orwell’s 1984.
Doublethink is the ability to accept two contradictory beliefs at the same time, while being totally unaware of the contradiction. In Orwell’s own words:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.
This morning I saw an excellent example of this on someone’s Facebook wall (translated by FB from the Icelandic, so not perfect):
Tertullian, one of the church fathers, born in the late second century, made the following observation regarding the birth, death and resurrection of Christ:
Natus est Dei Filius, non pudet, quia pudendum est;
et mortuus est Dei Filius, prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est;
et sepultus resurrexit, certum est, quia impossibile.
In English:
“The Son of God was born: there is no shame, because it is shameful.
And the Son of God died: it is wholly credible, because it is unsound.
And, buried, He rose again: it is certain, because it is impossible.”
Here, the contradiction is religious; only God can contradict himself, the absurd is allowed only to God; we mere mortals are bound by the rules of nature and the rules of logic. The only exemption is that through profound religious experience we can transcend the rules of logic and believe the absurd, hence “it is certain, because it is impossible.”
Does doublespeak have a religious dimension then?
Has the person who believes two contradictory statements at the same time in some way transcended reason, and entered into a religious dimension? Or has he simply lost his mind? |
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| From: Joachim K | 11/18/2022 5:22:35 PM | | | | | | ‘Et tu, Conrad?’ Even the ever-loyal Lord Black has turned on Donald Trump
With every vulgarity or indecency, Black rushed to defend his friend. He now joins a legion of Republicans who no longer think Trump a winner.
By Andrew Cohen
Fri., Nov. 18, 2022
For years, Donald Trump has had no more devoted disciple than Conrad Black. In a full-throated roar across columns, interviews and the 256 pages of a literary valentine, Black has expressed an enduring admiration and unshakable affection for Trump — before, during and after his presidency.
It’s uncanny, really. His fealty is quaint, courtly and even old-fashioned in this age of infidelity.
So, if you are Black’s “loyal friend,” “rather generous” and “always cordial,” a “raconteur” and “a good listener” who “never speaks over people” at a dinner party, it matters. If you were “extremely supportive” and “offered evidence” when Black was on trial for fraud and later in jail, it really matters.
For the last eight years or so — notably from the time Trump declared his candidacy in 2015, over the four years of his presidency and the two years since, Black has used his megaphone to defend Trump, excuse him and forgive him. Always.
With every cruelty, vulgarity and indecency Trump visited upon someone or something, with every illustration or allegation of self-enrichment, impropriety or criminality, Black would rush to the ramparts. Black could see the “stable genius” that Trump himself declared but most Americans did not see, even as Trump runs for president once again. ( He announced his candidacy Tuesday.)
There was Black, for example, claiming Trump did nothing wrong on Jan. 6, 2021, because he urged his supporters “ to demonstrate peacefully” as they marched on the Capitol. Prosecutors may disagree.
Trump could always rely on Black to mobilize his celebrity and deploy his arsenal of “rotund phrases,” as Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel, describes his use of language.
Sure, admits Black, Trump has had “ stylistic infelicities” and “vagaries,” as if he were your dotty uncle. And yes, his friend possessed a few harmless eccentricities, such as degrading women, insulting war heroes, trading in casual antisemitism and courting the Proud Boys. But this was Trump being Trump, a man of “foibles” and “fallibilities,” whom Black sees as “ a candidate” for Mount Rushmore.
“There is plenty of room to dislike or disagree with Donald Trump, but he is an astonishing political phenomenon,” Black says. All reasonable, wouldn’t you agree? As Black maintained to The New Yorker in 2020, “I am not whitewashing this guy.”
But if you disagree with Black on Trump, watch out. Black energetically lashes out at skeptical journalists. This is the danger of crossing Lord Black of Crossharbour.
Of course, becoming apologist-in-chief for the twice-impeached Trump had nothing to do with the pardon Trump gave Black in 2019. Which had nothing to do with the encomium (“A President Like No Other”) that Black published in 2018. Of course not.
Black was so besotted it clouded his judgment. He predicted big victories for Republicans in the elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022. (In 2019, Black predicted a historic Trump 2020 landslide like those enjoyed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and FDR in 1936.)
All of which is context for the Great Renunciation. Days after this month’s midterm elections, Black did the unthinkable: he broke with Trump. No longer was Trump presumptive president, as Black predicted — now he was past president.
In a betrayal for the ages, Black has turned on Trump. He has knifed him and thrown him under the chariot. Gazing at the assassin holding the ink-stained dagger, a bloodied Trump must have thought: “Et tu, Conrad?”
In his “updated assessment” for the National Post, Black graciously allows for “my mistaken prediction” that after the midterm elections Trump “will take even greater control than ever of the Republican Party.”
Black says he believes in “the utility of confession,” though this does not appear to mean apologizing for championing Trump as he peddled the canard of the “stolen” 2020 presidential election — and pushed hundreds of lawmakers to embrace the lie. Curiously, Black doesn’t say he was wrong about Trump as president, or even as a human being.
Suddenly, Black joins a legion of Republicans who no longer think Trump is a winner. They’re abandoning him. It’s an exquisite, head-spinning reversal. Now the future is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom Black anoints “a worthy continuator of the best aspects of the Trump legacy.”
So, the romance is over. Lord Black — obligations met, debts paid, book published, pardon conferred — has found a better prospect. Loyalty has its limits.
Andrew Cohen is a journalist, a professor at Carleton University and author of “Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.” |
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| From: Joachim K | 11/19/2022 11:56:18 PM | | | | | | Conrad Black: A Step Toward National Suicide?
BY TYLER DURDEN
SATURDAY, NOV 19, 2022 - 10:30 PM
Authored by Conrad Black via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The Nov. 8 midterm elections were a watershed in modern American history. The implications of choosing a president whom the public strongly disapproves of and is generally a failure, over a controversial but undoubtedly capable and successful ex-president, are very serious.
Democrat Party materials encouraging people to vote in the midterm general election are seen in Philadelphia on Nov, 7, 2022. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)
That the Democrats and their lock-step allies in the national media succeeded in putting across the colossal smear that former President Donald Trump is a supporter of violence and a threat to the constitutional system could be interpreted as a long step toward the national suicide that Abraham Lincoln foresaw is the only way in which the American project could perish.
Former CIA Director John Brennan called Trump a traitor; former National Intelligence Director James Clapper declared as a matter of settled fact that Trump was a Russian intelligence asset. The corruption of the FBI and the intelligence agencies in the dissemination of the infamous Steele dossier funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign as authentic intelligence revealing Trump as completely unsuited to public office and the profound dishonesty of former FBI Director James Comey in white-washing Clinton’s alleged destruction of subpoenaed evidence and his recourse to surveillance granted in response to false affidavits while attempting to destroy the Trump presidency have escaped legal retribution by the somnambulant Durham investigation, and there will be no retribution for any of it.
Yet, Trump is the tainted protagonist. The Russian collusion hoax was the most monstrous defamation ever inflicted on a U.S. president. The spurious impeachment of him, for an innocuous telephone call to the president of Ukraine about the commercial activities of the Biden family in his country—now notorious but probably a matter of political suppression of the normal working of American justice—was in the same category of misuse of the political system for the lowest and most destructive partisan ends.
It’s obvious that the potentially millions of harvested ballots that couldn’t be verified in the 2020 presidential election could easily have provided the 50,000 vote switchover needed in Pennsylvania and two other states to flip that election to Trump in the Electoral College. The dishonesty of the universal media stone wall that 2020 was a pristine presidential election is compounded by the judiciary’s abdication of its coequal role in government and reassertion of its refusal to consider overturning the apparent presidential election result.
Democratic strategists deserve a near-perfect score for tactical judgment: They rounded up a big majority among young voters by hammering the abortion issue, emphasizing the reduction in marijuana penalties, and championing student loan forgiveness. This and the malicious and unctuous pressing of the safety of democracy as a euphemism for the defamatory nonsense that Trump was a menace to the Constitution turned the minds of an adequate number of voters to produce a dangerously perverse result. They have pretty well given up the former slanders that Trump is a racist, homophobe, and misogynist.
Tabulating all of the votes cast for all offices contested last week, the Republicans outpolled the Democrats all over. The Democrats only took what they needed. Politics is a notoriously unjust occupation; Trump is objectively perhaps among the 10 most successful holders of that office. But he did great harm to himself by his lack of public relations judgment, and this fact in the hands of the political and social media monopoly of his enemies working with the strategists and saboteurs in the Democratic leadership have unfortunately won the match.
But even the voters who rendered such an ambiguous result on Nov. 8 have betrayed a concern that the incompetence of the Biden administration, with the duplicity of the Democratic congressional leaders, can’t go on indefinitely. But they’ve demonstrated that Trump isn’t the man to stop them and to tear the government apart and repopulate it with people with clean hands.
There’s still an important place for Trump to complete the task that he commenced of transporting the Republican Party from the country clubs to the championship of the disadvantaged and working and middle class of America, and to cleaning out the bipartisan infestation of placemen and decayed servitors of the federal political and administrative state. But the former president is far from blameless in his own misfortunes. He warned of the dangers of ballot harvesting in 2020 but was completely inadequate in taking preventive measures or even following up efficiently to challenge the vulnerable points. Instead, we had the well-intended but completely ineffectual efforts of Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell. In order to make his case plausibly, he absolutely had to avoid precisely the sort of outrage that occurred on Jan. 6, 2021. But the fact that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser paid no attention to Trump’s warnings that matters could get out of hand and his offer of 20,000 National Guardsmen indicates the Democrats’ role was a good deal less innocent than they pretend.
But Trump knew what desperate and sleazy people he was dealing with, and he doesn’t have a credible excuse for being so reckless. This condemned him to having to continue to emphasize the 2020 election irregularities in order to justify his calling forth such a huge and discontented crowd at the Washington Elipse on Jan. 6, 2021. Of course, he no more sought an insurrection than Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) did.
The only way to complete Trump’s work and root out and politically exterminate those who have corrupted the intelligence and justice arms of the federal government and have dragooned the contemptible but still insidiously influential national political media in full metal jacket Trump-hate, is for Trump to identify and support the successor whom he favors as Republican presidential candidate.
He shouldn’t go back to his 2016 playbook and insult all the other prominent Republicans. He has exchanged enough fire with his Republican enemies, contemptible though many of them are, and did well to win the first round and come so close in the second. The third round last week was an acute disappointment, and the Republican Party doesn’t need, and the American public doesn’t wish for, an internecine war on the scale that would rage if Trump sought another presidential nomination. But another candidate plausibly pledged to the enactment of the Trump program and supported by Trump but not stigmatized by him, could lead the desperately needed national political purgation.
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| From: Joachim K | 11/20/2022 1:25:39 PM | | | | | | Kevin McCarthy says he’ll remove Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs committee because of her antisemitism
NOV 20, 2022 1:00 PM
BY ROBERT SPENCER
1 COMMENT
We’ll see if McCarthy follows through. Don’t be surprised if they strike some deal and he backs down.
“Kevin McCarthy to pull Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs committee over antisemitism,” by Ari Hoffman, The Post Millennial, November 19, 2022:
Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said Saturday that when he becomes the speaker of the House of Representatives in January he plans to remove “Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar, (D-MN), from the House Foreign Affairs Committee due to her “antisemitic” comments.
When the Republicans take the majority in the House next year, McCarthy will likely become the next speaker, pending a vote for the position on Jan. 3.
Speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s 2022 leadership meeting in Las Vegas McCarthy pledged to the audience “We watch antisemitism grow, not just on our campuses, but we watched it grow In the halls of Congress. I promised you last year that as speaker she will no longer be on Foreign Affairs, and I’m keeping that promise.”
The room erupted in cheers in response.
Since she was elected to Congress in 2018, Omar has had a history of making many comments against Jews and Israel and using antisemitic tropes. After being elected to Congress, she submitted a resolution to the House comparing boycotting the Jewish state of Israel to boycotting the Nazis.
In February 2021, 1,500 rabbis called on Congress to rescind the appointment of Rep. Ilhan Omar, (D-MN), to the position of vice chair of the House foreign affairs subcommittee based on her past anti-Semitic statements and behavior.
Omar has an extensive history of using anti-Semitic statements and tropes as well as promoting conspiracy theories about Jews. In a now-deleted tweet Omar wrote “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel. #Gaza#Palestine#Israel”
In another now-deleted tweet, Omar said Jews were buying political support tweeting, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.”
According to The Daily Wire, in an interview, Omar suggested: “Israel should not be allowed to exist as a Jewish state, Israel is not a democracy, and compared Israel to Iran — which is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.”
Omar also embraced the anti-Semitic heads of the Woman’s March which included Linda Sarsour…. |
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