Daily Archives: 12 January 2022

Congressman Jordan Demurs

Posted on by
Reply

Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) has declined Congressman and Chairman of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol Bennie Thompson’s (D, MS) “request” to appear before that J6 committee. His letter carrying his decision to Thompson laid the matter out in no uncertain terms.

Leaving aside Jordan’s notice that the J6 committee’s summons of Jordan (and of Congressman Scott Perry (R, PA), I add) is an assault (Jordan used “pry”) on a sitting Congressman’s deliberative process informing a Member about legislative matters before the House is an outrageous abuse of the Select Committee’s authority, he laid out a number of other reasons for his decision.

As you well know, I have no relevant information that would assist the Select Committee in advancing any legitimate legislative purpose. I cannot speak to Speaker Pelosi’s failure to ensure the appropriate security posture at the Capitol complex in advance of well-publicized protests on January 6, 2021. I cannot elaborate on former US Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund’s statement that a concern about “optics”—following widespread calls from Democrats in 2020 to defund the police—contributed to the limited security response. I have nothing to add to the bipartisan, comprehensive findings of the Senate investigative committees or to those issued by federal inspectors general. I cannot testify about the Justice Department’s ongoing law-enforcement efforts, although I am aware of reports that the FBI has determined the violence was not coordinated or part of any “organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.”

Jordan, in his letter, also took notice that the J6 committee seems superfluous (my term), since House Democrats have already determined the committee’s outcome:

House Democrats have already prejudged the results of the Select Committee’s work, declaring in their February 2021 impeachment brief that President Trump is “unmistakabl[y]” responsible for the events of January 6. Democrats have accused their Republican colleagues of “sedition” and called them “traitors” for objecting to Electoral College results in certain states—an official action taken pursuant to federal law, and the same objections that you and other senior House Democrats made following the 2000, 2004, and 2016 presidential elections.

He also laid out individual Progressive-Democrat committee members’ dishonesty:

  • In a widely distributed letter, you falsely accused former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik of attending a meeting in Washington on January 5, 2021, when Kerik was actually in New York City.
  • During a business meeting to consider holding our former colleague Mark Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress, Representative Adam Schiff, a member of the Select Committee, doctored a text message I had forwarded to Mr. Meadows.
  • During the floor debate on the Meadows criminal contempt resolution, Representative Jamie Raskin, another member of the Select Committee, falsely attributed a second text message to a “lawmaker” when in fact it was not sent by any Member of Congress.

Jordan is being polite. Speaker Pelosi’s (D, CA) J6 committee is not just the cudgel for smearing Republicans that he terms it; it’s a kangaroo court being used to assault an opposition party and attempt to delegitimize it through innuendo, ad hominem, and outright lie.

Jordan’s letter can be read here via Fox News.

Iran’s Nuclear Weapons

Posted on by
Reply

With the pseudo-negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program going the way they are, President Joe Biden, of the Biden-Harris Presidency, is rapidly coming to the first of two moments of truth.

The first is whether Biden-Harris will fold in the talks—he is, after all, consigned by the Ayatollah to the kiddie table where he’s to be seen and not heard by the adults in the room—and give Khamenei everything he wants just so Biden-Harris can come home claiming a deal, however disastrous.

That, though, is a moment of lesser truth. The greater truth moment will come after. As Dubowitz and Kroenig put it in their op-ed at the link,

A nuclear-armed Iran would cause further proliferation as regional powers like Saudi Arabia build their own bombs.

But that’s a lesser truth, also, for all that it’s a greater one than the first. Dubowitz and Kroenig also have this:

It might take a year or two to fashion a functioning nuclear warhead that is deliverable on a missile, but once the clerical regime has enough weapons-grade material, the game is over.

The nuclear warhead doesn’t have to be delivered via missile, though. There are a variety of ways to…truck…such device into Israel.

In the event, too, Iran is likely to wait until it has four or five nuclear warheads, since that is what it will take—and all it will take—to destroy Israel as a polity and as a people. And Iran will strike the moment that fourth or fifth weapon becomes operational.

Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former President of Iran and then-Chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council, on World Al-Qods Day in 2001, as cited by the Middle East Media Research Institute:

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

And here is the greatest moment of truth for Biden-Harris. Will he, can he, make

the fateful choice between allowing the clerical regime to become a nuclear-weapons power and using military force to stop it.

Will he make the military strike that Dubowitz and Kroenig suggest will be necessary to prevent Iran’s getting nuclear weapons?

Sadly, Biden-Harris doesn’t have it in him to make the strike. The most we can hope for, and it’s a very thin reed given his and his Progressive-Democratic Party’s open hostility toward Israel, is that Biden-Harris will stay out of the way and let Israel and Saudi Arabia (the latter very sub rosa) conduct the strike.