Disinformation Purveying

Randy Manner (Maj Gen, ret) accused, in his Wall Street Journalop-ed…former President and Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump of spreading disinformation regarding the Federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene. Tellingly, he opened his jeremiad with his own disinformation.

Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would dismantle these lifelines and force communities to face disasters on their own.

There is no connection whatsoever between Trump and Project 2025. Both Trump and The Heritage Foundation, authors of the document, say so. The only ones who claim otherwise are the press’ imaginary “folks who know” and Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who quote that press.

Manner’s disinformation extends into Project 2025 itself.

Project 2025 would push the privatization of disaster-relief functions currently managed by FEMA….

It’s instructive that Manner chose not to quote the project where it proposes that. He cannot because the project proposes no such thing. Project 2025 itself (pgs 133-134) actually proposes dismantling DHS, which it says is dysfunctional, while saving FEMA by alternatively moving it to the Department of the Interior or combining it with CISA and moving the combination to the Department of Transportation.

Regarding Manner’s dishonest claim regarding privatizing FEMA, what the project actually proposes (pg 135) is

privatizing…the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Flood Insurance Program….

This is far from privatizing FEMA. Beyond that, letting insurance entities compete in a free market would bring down the costs to insurees, and to us taxpayers regarding government insurance entities, of insurance.

Manner’s distortions and disinformation peddling brings dishonor on the uniform he used to wear.

Regarding shifting FEMA spending, the project does propose

shift[ing] the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government….

But that’s where the responsibility should lie in our republican democracy. The State and local governments are the entities on the scene (on-scene command is a concept with which an ex-flag officer should be familiar), they know far better than the Federal government what the needs of their citizens are, and being closest to the scene of the disaster area and to those citizens within it, they are far better positioned to provide the immediate aid and targeted support those citizens need than is the Federal government. The Florida State and local governments are empirical demonstrations of this.

Only a Big Government enthusiast, who sees States merely as districts to facilitate the purposes of the central government (as John Jay would have had it at our Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia), would act as though we’re not a republican democracy, not a republic.

Manner should be ashamed of himself for writing such a jeremiad.

Lies of Progressive-Democrats

This time centered on their support for terrorists in the Middle East. An all-too-typical example is given by Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Instead of securing the release of the hostages, however, Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu has unleashed unthinkable violence on innocent civilians in Gaza. More than a million Palestinians are facing starvation. We see videos of dead children held in the arms of their parents. Violence is escalating throughout the region, including most recently in Lebanon, threatening even more human suffering.

No, Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Force have been at pains to minimize civilian deaths to the point of broadcasting their next target area and encouraging civilians to leave before an attack goes in—an advance warning that runs up IDF casualties as terrorists who don’t leave with the civilians dig in and are better prepared to resist the attack.

Those civilian deaths, contra Warren, are caused by the terrorists, who work to prevent civilians from leaving the targeted areas so as to use them as shields for the terrorists remaining to fight; caused by the terrorists who use, as a matter of course, civilians as shields as whenever and wherever they fight; caused by terrorists who use civilian churches, mosques, schools, and hospitals for weapons storage and command/control centers; caused by terrorists who use those facilities and civilian residences as sites from which to launch their rockets, which are targeted against Israeli civilians.

Far from naïve, as the Wall Street Journal editors close their piece with, Warren most certainly knows better; she’s lying about the responsibility for the civilian deaths in Gaza and Lebanon as Israel fights for its survival.

Lies of Progressive-Democrats

This time, centered on the question of abortion.

Progressive-Democrat Minnesota governor and Party Vice President candidate Tim Walz:

…in the recent vice-presidential debate said that Republicans support “a registry of pregnancies.” This followed Mr Walz’s claim last month that “[Donald] Trump is trying to create this new government entity that will monitor all pregnancies to enforce their abortion bans.”

No one is pushing for such a registry—the closest to that is by the Leftist Guttmacher Institute, which collects data on the incidence of abortion and related issues, and that’s no registry, either.

Walz’ claim comes on the heels of other of his lies, like how he was in Tiananmen Square the day of that mass government killing of protestors when he actually was in Nebraska, and how he bailed on his unit to go do politics rather than deploy to a combat zone and subsequently lying about his retirement rank.

Rudy Salas, Party candidate for the House of Representatives:

Washington Republicans want to criminalize abortion, even when a woman has been raped or is facing a medical emergency[.]

Never mind that his opponent Congressman David Valadao is on record as both opposing a national ban on abortion (it’s another Progressive-Democrat widespread lie that Republicans will enact such a ban next year) and insisting on exceptions for rape, incest, and the mother’s life risk.

Progressive-Democrat Mondaire Jones, in his desperation to get back into Congress (he lost his 2022 primary campaign when he was the incumbent),

says Congressman Mike Lawler “would ban abortions in New York.” Mr Jones says…that the Republican platform “would ban abortions even here in New York.”

He can’t point to the claim in the Republican platform that does that because it isn’t there. Further, Lawler says he wants abortion exceptions for rape, incest, and the mother’s health, and that he’ll respect the will of the state’s voters whom the Supreme Court have given exclusive jurisdiction over the abortion issue. In other words, he says he works for his constituents, not the other way around.

The list goes on, far past the short list of examples (abridged further by me) in the Wall Street Journal editorial.

Do we really want anyone this dishonest, or this incapable of dealing with simple facts, representing any of us, or having any role at all in our government?

Broken Promises

The lede lays it out.

Government makes many promises, the Biden Administration more than most. Results are another story.

Here’s an all too typical example:

The 2021 infrastructure law included $42.5 billion for states to expand broadband to “unserved,” mostly rural, communities. Three years later, ground hasn’t been broken on a single project. The Administration recently said construction won’t start until next year at the earliest, meaning many projects won’t be up and running until the end of the decade.

With this follow-up:

Blame the Administration’s political regulations. States must submit plans to the Commerce Department about how they’ll use the funds and their bidding process for providers. Commerce has piled on mandates that are nowhere in the law and has rejected state plans that don’t advance progressive goals.

Whatever. That excuse misses the point. These program failures aren’t unique to the Biden-Harris administration. These incumbents are only the latest example. No, the failures have gone on for so long, across nearly all 235-ish years of Federal administrations, that it should be well-understood, by us average Americans and by the politicians who make them, that promises in the name of Government are just lies: they know when they make those promises that they won’t be carried out.

The answer lies not in making Government men live up to their government program promises; it lies in getting Government out of our economy almost altogether, and letting us citizens and our private enterprises do their trick in a free market unhamstrung by government promises, much less excessive regulatory laws and regulations.

One Effect of Biden’s Favoring Iran

This demonstrates the effect Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s moral equivalence between terrorist- and terrorism-supporting Iran on the one hand and Israel on the other—which amounts to favoring Iran over Israel—has on the situation in the Middle East:

The decision to approve the September 27 strike [killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah] from US soil without alerting the White House beforehand—and later to make public a photo of himself issuing the order—underscored the growing divergence between Netanyahu’s government and the White House.

Netanyahu was speaking directly to Biden with that decision and that method of delivery, but Biden wouldn’t listen.

Biden has done nothing useful in support of Israel, only pushing for—demanding, along with his Secretary of Milquetoast Antony Blinken—Israel to agree a cease-fire even as the IDF is on the verge of defeating decisively both Hamas and Hezbollah, a cease-fire Biden and his syndicate members know full well favors only the terrorists. Biden has been, occasionally, deliberately counterproductive to Israel’s interests, its very survival, by withholding, however briefly, the ammunition resupply the nation needs.

And this:

In the short term, Israel’s unilateral decision-making about striking Iran risks embroiling the Biden administration in another unpopular regional conflict. In the longer term, it could be another flashpoint for critics who say the US gives Israel too much leeway, not using its leverage to rein in its ally.

Rein in!? This is the arrogance of those in the Biden administration, and outside it, who insist, in all seriousness that Israel is nothing but a US satrap, if not a US territory—they’re insisting that Israel isn’t an autonomous, sovereign nation in its own right.

And this:

US attempts to rein in Israel in Gaza yielded only limited results, analysts say.

Analysts are carefully ignoring the major result from the Biden administration’s constant interference in IDF operations in Gaza. By holding Israel back, Biden and his have only prolonged the fight in Gaza, at the expense of more terrorist-caused civilian deaths during the prolonged fighting, increased Israeli casualties, and the murders of more hostages before IDF units could locate and get to them.

It’s no wonder the Israeli government increasingly dismisses Biden administration attempts to pressure and to determine Israel’s self-defense actions.

But it’s not just Joe Biden who’s badly failing here.

As Vice President, it’s hard for Kamala Harris to separate herself from her boss’ position. However, as Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate, it’s imperative that Harris make her position clear on this question. As the highly talented politician and impressively intelligent woman that Party now makes her out to be, of course Harris knows how to walk that seeming divergence. Thus: it’s clear from Harris’ silence on the specifics, and from her Senate colleague Bernie Sanders’ statements regarding the sincerity of her current words, that despite her loud claims of standing four-square with Israel, she agrees with her boss’ favoring Iran and its coming nuclear weapons availability over the security of Israel.