'' Actually, Joe, All Your ‘Objectives’ Were Failures''

amgreatness.com/2023/08/21/actually-joe-all-your-objectives-were-failures

August 21, 2023

Here's a list of what he should actually apologize for

By Victor Davis Hanson

August 21, 2023

“Name me a single objective we’ve ever set out to accomplish that we’ve failed on. Name me one, in all of our history. Not one!”

-usurPeresident Joe Biden, August 16, 2023

Joe Biden in one of his now accustomed angry “get off my grass” moods dared the press to find just one of his policies/objectives that has not worked. Silence followed.

Perhaps it was polite to say nothing, given even the media knows almost every enacted Biden policy has failed.

Here is a summation of what he should instead apologize for.

Biden in late summer 2021 sought a 20th anniversary celebration of 9/11 and the 2001 subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. He wished to be the landmark president that yanked everyone out of Afghanistan after 20 years in country. But the result was the greatest military humiliation of the United States since the flight from Vietnam in 1975.

Consider the ripples of Biden’s disaster. U.S. deterrence was crippled worldwide. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea almost immediately began to bluster or return to their chronic harassment of U.S. and allied ships and planes. We left thousands of allied Afghans to face Taliban retribution, along with some Western contractors.

Biden abandoned a $1 billion embassy, and a $300 million remodeled Bagram airbase strategically located not far from China and Russia, and easily defensible. Perhaps $50 billion in U.S. weaponry and supplies were abandoned and now find their way into the international terrorist mart.

All our pride flags, our multimillion gender studies programs at Kabul University, and our George Floyd murals did not just come to naught but were replaced by the Taliban’s anti-homosexual campaigns, burkas, and detestation of any trace of American popular culture.

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>>19399828

Vladimir Putin sized up the skedaddle. He collated it with Biden’s unhinged quip that he would not get too excited if Putin just staged a “minor” invasion of Ukraine. He remembered Biden’s earlier request to Putin to modulate Russian hacking to exempt a few humanitarian American institutions. Then Russia concluded of our shaky Commander-in-Chief that he either did not care or could do nothing about another Russian invasion.

The result so far is more than 500,000 dead and wounded in the war, a Verdun-stand-off along with fortified lines, the steady depletion of our munitions and weapon stocks, and a new China/Russia/Iran/North Korean axis, with wink and nod assistance from NATO Turkey.

Biden blew up the Abraham accords, nudged Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States over to the dark side of Iran, China, and Russia. He humiliated the U.S. on the eve of the midterms by callously begging the likes of Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and Saudi Arabia to pump more oil that he had damned as unclean at home and cut back its production. In Bidenomics, instead of producing oil, the president begs autocracies to export it to us at high prices while he drains the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve for short-term political advantage.

Biden deliberately alienated Israel by openly interfering in its domestic politics. He pursued the crackpot Iran Deal while his special Iranian envoy was removed for disclosing classified information.

No one can explain why Biden ignored the Chinese balloon espionage caper, kept mum about the engineered Covid virus that escaped the Wuhan lab, said not a word about a Chinese bio lab discovered in rural California, and had his envoys either bow before Chinese leaders or take their insults in silence—other than he is either cognitively challenged or leveraged by his decade-long grifting partnership with his son Hunter.

Yet another Biden’s legacy will be erasing the southern border and with it, U.S. immigration law. Over seven million aliens simply crossed into the U.S. illegally with Biden’s tacit sanction—without audits, background checks, vaccinations, and COVID testing, much less English fluency, skills, or high-school diplomas.

Biden’s only immigration accomplishment was to render the entire illegal sanctuary city movement a cruel joke. Given the flood, mostly rich urban and vacation home dwellers made it very clear that while they fully support millions swarming into poor Latino communities of southern Texas and Arizona, they do not want any illegal aliens fouling their carefully cultivated nests.

Biden is mum about the 100,000 fentanyl deaths from cartel-imported and Chinese-supplied drugs across his open border. He seems to like the idea that Mexican President Obrador periodically mouths off, ordering his vast expatriate community to vote Democratic and against Trump.

Despite all the pseudo-blue-collar dissimulation about Old Joe Biden from Scranton, he has little empathy for the working classes. Indeed, he derides them as chumps and dregs, urges miners to learn to code as the world covets their coal, and studiously avoids getting anywhere near the toxic mess in East Palestine, Ohio, or so far the moonscape on Maui.

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>>19399829

Bidenomics is a synonym for printing up to $6 billion dollars at precisely the time post-Covid consumer demand was soaring, while previously dormant supply chains were months behind rebooting production and transportation. Biden is on track to increase the national debt more than any one-term president.

In Biden’s weird logic, if he raised the price of energy, gasoline, and key food staples 20-30 percent since his inauguration without a commensurate rise in wages, and then saw the worst inflation in 40 years occasionally decline from record highs one month to the next, then he “beat inflation.”

But the reason why more than 60 percent of the nation has no confidence in Bidenomics is because it destroyed their household budgets. Gas is nearly twice what it was in January 2021. Interest rates have about tripled. Key staple foods are often twice as costly—meat, vegetables, and fruits especially.

Biden has ended through his weaponized Attorney General Merrick Garland the age-old American commitment to equal justice under the law. The FBI, DOJ, CIA, and IRS are hopelessly politically compromised. Many of their bureaucrats serve as retrieval agents for lost Biden family incriminating laptops, diaries, and guns. In sum, Biden criminalized opposing political views.

Biden has unleashed the administrative state for the first time in history to destroy the Republican primary front runner and his likely opponent. His legacy will be the corruption of U.S. jurisprudence and the obliteration of the American reputation for transparent permanent government that should be always above politics, bribery, and corruption.

If in the future, an on-the-make conservative prosecutor in West Virginia, Utah, or Mississippi wishes to make a national name, then he has ample precedent to indict a Democrat President for receiving bad legal advice, questioning the integrity of an election, or using social media to express doubt that the new non-Election-Day balloting was on the up-and-up, or supposedly overvaluing his real estate.

The Biden family’s decade-long family grifting will likely expose Joe Biden as the first president in U.S. history who fitted precisely the Constitution’s definition of impeachment and removal—given his “high crimes and misdemeanors” appear “bribery”-related. If further evidence shows he altered U.S. foreign policy in accordance with the wishes from his benefactors in Ukraine, China, or Romania, then he committed constitutionally-defined “treason” as well.

Defunding the police, and pandemics of exempted looting, shoplifting, smashing, and grabbing, and carjacking merit no administrative attention. Nor does the ongoing systematic destruction of our blue bicoastal cities, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. All that, along with the disasters in East Palestine or Maui are out of sight, out of mind from a day at the beach at Biden’s mysteriously purchased nearly 6,000 square-foot beachfront mansion.

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>>19399832

>>19399829

>>19399828

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/21/actually-joe-all-your-objectives-were-failures/

Biden ran on Barack Obama-like 2004 rhetoric (“Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America).”

And like Obama, he used that ecumenical sophistry to gain office only to divide further the U.S. No sooner than he was elected, we began hearing from the great unifier eerie screaming harangues about “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” dangerous zealots, replete with red-and-black Phantom of the Opera backdrops.

What followed the unifying rhetoric was often amnesties and exemptions for violent offenders during the 120 days of rioting, looting, killing, and attacks on police officers in summer 2020. In contrast, his administration lied when it alleged that numerous officers had died at the hands of the January 6 rioters. In addition, the Biden administration mandated long-term incarceration of many who committed no illegal act other than acting like buffoons and “illegally parading.”

The message was exemptions for torching a federal courthouse, a police precinct, or a historic church or attempting to break into the White House grounds to get a president and his family—but long prison terms for wearing cow horns, a fur vest, and trespassing peacefully like a lost fool in the Capitol.

Finally, Biden’s most glaring failure was simply being unpresidential. He snaps at reporters and shouts at importune times. He can no longer read off a big-print teleprompter. Even before a global audience, he cannot kick his lifelong creepy habit of turkey-gobbling on children's necks, blowing into their ears and hair of young girls, and squeezing women far too long and far too hard.

His frailty redefined American presidential campaigning as basement seclusion and outsourcing propaganda to the media. And his disabilities only intensified during his presidency. Biden begins his day late and quits early. He has recalibrated the presidency as a 5-hour, 3-day-a-week job.

If Trump was the great exaggerator, Biden is our foremost liar. Little in his biography can be fully believed. He lies about everything from his train rides to the death of his son to his relationship with Biden-family foreign collaborators, to vaccinations to the economy. Anytime Biden mentions places visited, miles flown, or rails ridden, he is likely lying.

Biden continues with impunity because the media feels that a mentally challenged fabulist is preferable to Donald Trump and so contextualizes or ignores his falsehoods. Never has a U.S. president fallen and stumbled or gotten lost on stage so frequently—or been a single small trip away from incapacity.

So, yes, Biden’s initiatives have succeeded only in the sense of becoming successfully enacted—and therefore nearly destroying the country.

4:4

'' The disqualification of Donald Trump and other legal urban legends''

thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/4158573-the-disqualification-of-donald-trump-and-other-legal-urban-legends

Jonathan Turley, Opinion ContributorAugust 19, 2023

The popularity of urban legends is a testament to the will to believe. The desire of people to keep Elvis alive or prove that a Sasquatch could exist furtively in our backyards shows the resilience of fables.

Constitutional urban legends often have an even more immediate appeal and tend to arise out of the desperation of divided times. One of the most popular today is that former President Donald Trump can be barred from office, even if he is not convicted in any of the four indictments he faces, under a long-dormant clause of the 14th Amendment.

This 14th Amendment theory is something that good liberals will read to their children at night. It goes something like this: Donald Trump can never be president again, because the 14th Amendment bars those who previously took federal oaths from assuming office if they engaged in insurrection or rebellion. With that, and a kiss on the forehead, a progressive’s child can sleep peacefully through the night.

But don’t look under the bed. For as scary as it might sound to some, Trump can indeed take office if he is elected…even if he is convicted. Indeed, he can serve as president even in the unlikely scenario that he is sentenced to jail.

Democrats have long pushed this theory about the 14th Amendment as a way of disqualifying not only Trump but also dozens of Republican members of Congress. From some, it is the ultimate Hail Mary pass if four indictments, roughly 100 criminal charges and more than a dozen opposing candidates fail to get the job done.

I have strongly rejected this interpretation for years, so it is too late to pretend that I view this as a plausible argument. However, some serious and smart people take an equally strong position in support of the theory. Indeed, conservative scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen have argued for the interpretation and insist in a recent law review article that “the case is not even close. All who are committed to the Constitution should take note and say so.”

But some of us like to believe that we are committed to the Constitution and, for that same reason, we say no.

Despite my respect for these academics, I simply fail to see how the text, history or purpose of the 14th Amendment even remotely favors this view. Despite the extensive research of Baude and Paulsen, their analysis ends where it began: Was January 6 an insurrection or rebellion?

I have previously addressed the constitutional basis for this claim. It is, in my view, wildly out of sync with the purpose of the amendment, which followed an actual rebellion, the Civil War.

>>19399849

Democraps have previously sought to block the certification of Republican presidents and Democratic lawyers have challenged elections, including on totally unsupported claims of machines flipping the results. If we are to suddenly convert the 14th Amendment into a running barrier to those who seek to challenge election results, then we have to establish a bright line to distinguish such cases.

The 14th Amendment bars those who took the oath and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.” It then adds that that disqualification can extend to those who have “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” According to these experts, Jan. 6 was an “insurrection” and Trump gave “aid and comfort” to those who engaged in it by spreading election fraud claims and not immediately denouncing the violence.

But even the view that it was an “insurrection” is by no means a consensus. Polls have shown that most of the public view Jan. 6 for what it was: a protest that became a riot. One year after the riot, CBS News mostly downplayed and ignored the result of its own poll showing that 76 percent viewed it for what it was, as a “protest gone too far.” The view that it was an actual “insurrection” was far less settled, with almost half rejecting the claim, a division breaking along partisan lines.

The theory that this was a rebellion or insurrection has always been highly contested. On Jan. 6, I was contributing to the coverage and denounced Trump’s speech while he was still giving it. But as the protest increased in size, some of us noted that we had never seen such a comparatively light level of security precautions, given the weeks of coverage anticipating the protest. We then watched as thinly deployed police barriers were overrun and a riot ensued. It was appalling, and most of us denounced it as it was unfolding.

Trump waited to speak, despite criticism from many of us. We now know that many aides called for him to call upon his supporters to pull back, but he waited for a couple hours.

Sulking in the Oval Office does not make Trump a seditionist. Indeed, despite formal articles of the second impeachment and years of experts insisting that Trump was guilty of incitement and insurrection, Special Counsel Jack Smith notably did not charge him with any such crime.

The reason is obvious. The evidence and constitutional standards would not have supported a charge of incitement or insurrection.

Yet these experts still believe that Trump can be barred from office without any such charge even being brought, let alone a conviction.

Putting aside the lack of evidence, there is a lack of logic to these claims. A relatively small number of individuals have been charged with seditious conspiracy, a widely misrepresented charge that can amount to as little as preventing the execution of any law.

If Trump supported a rebellion or insurrection, what was the plan? Not only did Smith not charge him with any such crime, but there was little evidence that even the most radical defendants charged were planning to overthrow the nation’s government or were part of a broader conspiracy. There were no troops standing by, no plan for a post-democratic takeover by Trump or his alleged minions. At worst, according to witnesses against Trump, there was a despondent and defiant president who may have gotten satisfaction from the chaos in Congress.

That leaves us with the argument that any effort to stop a constitutional process is akin to an insurrection or rebellion under the 14th Amendment. If that were the standard, any protests — including the anti-Trump protests and the certification challenges to electoral votes in 2016 — could also be cited as disqualifying. If that were the case, figures such as Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md) could be summarily purged from office for having sought to overturn an election.

The wrong way to talk about Ukraine’s counteroffensive Why are Congress’s budget experts failing to address the rise of climate-related health care spending?

We would be left on a slippery slope, as partisan judges and members would seek to block opposing candidates from ballots, all supposedly in the name of protecting democracy.

There is a simpler and more obvious explanation for what occurred on Jan. 6, 2021: A political protest became a political riot, and a constitutional theory became a constitutional legend.

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>>19399865

And BOOM: Glenn Greenwald drops George Takei and all war-hungry Lefties in SPECTACULAR, historic thread

twitchy.com/samj/2023/08/21/glenn-greenwald-drops-george-takei-and-all-war-hungry-lefties-n2386456

Sam J.

As Twitchy readers know, George Takei said something stupid about war.

And climate change.

And the border.

And COVID.

And the upcoming election.

Let's face it, Takei says a lot of stupid stuff that we get to cover … so thanks for the Twitchy fodder, Sulu. Especially when peeps like Glenn Greenwald step in to take him apart.

This is savage but deserved, and it all started here:

Pro tip: Whenever you see someone saying, “We could be spending that money on X instead of sending it to Ukraine” it probably originated from and was amplified by the Russians.

Be smarter out there. I know for some of you it’s hard.

— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) August 19, 2023

Man, we thought Lefties were anti-war and stuff?

JUST kidding.

But it makes what Greenwald did here that much more effective.

That massive spending on war and weaponry impedes domestic progress and erodes Americans' quality of life has been a staple of left-liberal politics for decades.

It was MLK's key point in his April 4, 1967 speech on Vietnam.

Now, liberals scorn this view as Kremlin propaganda: https://t.co/xddJtHot6j

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 20, 2023

Billions and billions sent to Ukraine. Meanwhile, millions sent to Hawaii …

Last time we checked, Russians weren't the ones who were worried about Hawaiians dying. Just sayin'.

He continued:

For foreign policy, militarism, imperialism and war, the primary ideology of large media corporations isn't "left" or "right." It's subservience to the narratives of the the US Security State. That's why liberals now think and sound like David Frum:https://t.co/oWv2QmHCo1

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 20, 2023

Oof … and nobody wants to sound like David Frum. Not even David Frum.

If you have some spare time, I highly recommend reading the whole MLK speech.

He apologizes for his lateness in opposing the Vietnam War. He had been told he should stay away from war to focus only on domestic issues. He realized they are inextricable:

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 20, 2023

>>19399896

https://twitchy.com/samj/2023/08/21/glenn-greenwald-drops-george-takei-and-all-war-hungry-lefties-n2386456

https://twitter.com/nataliegwinters/status/1693640765396685082

The federal government has already begun buying COVID-19 equipment and hiring consultants to enforce pandemic-era "safety protocols."

Some of these contracts are scheduled to begin in September and October.

11:06 AM · Aug 21, 2023

>>19399999

>>19400099

Tiffany

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Lunch at Tiffany's

Dinner at Tiffany's

>>19400129