Category Archives: politics

Disinformation Purveying

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Randy Manner (Maj Gen, ret) accused, in his Wall Street Journal…op-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.

“My Values Haven’t Changed”

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Recall that that’s what Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris said when she was asked how she explained her changed rhetoric regarding her positions on our border, taxes, and spending.

She made that claim concrete with this exchange when she guested on The View:

The View: If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?
Harris: There is not a thing that comes to mind[.]

She’s sticking to her prior policies of wanting to raise taxes, increase government spending, and decriminalizing coming across borders illegally. Her values have been concretized by the actions and attempted actions of her and her titular boss, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s, administration. She’s sticking to her values that increases in taxes are good, increases in government spending are good, and leaving our borders wide open is good.

Israel for Sovereignty

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And against leaks. The headline and subheadline summarize the situation.

U.S. Frustrated by Israel’s Reluctance to Share Iran Retaliation Plans
The Biden administration hopes to avoid a repeat of surprise attacks, such as the killing of Hezbollah’s leader

Israel is behaving like a sovereign nation and not at all like a province of Biden’s dreamland. That frustrates him and his.

Why, though, would Israel want to “share” its plans vis-à-vis Iran (or Hezbollah or Hamas, come to that)? Biden’s administration will only leak those plans, and Iran (and its terrorist arms) would be the better prepared. ‘Course, in my cynical mind, it might be useful for Israel to share one set of plans and then execute another. What Iran was prepared for in the realization would tell a very powerful tale about those leaks, even whether they exist.

We also have this: while the Harris-Biden administration (as Biden sometimes terms it) was trying to force onto Israel finalize a Hezbollah-Israel cease-fire, the IDF successfully killed Hezbollah’s MFWIC Hassan Nasrallah. In an initial telecon immediately after the strike, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that the strike had gone in, successfully. Then,

[d]uring a second call the same day, Austin asked Gallant if Israel was prepared to be “alone” when it came to defending itself, given the lack of notice.

This is the administration threatening Israel to kowtow and stop cutting out the US from planning Israel’s defense moves in the middle of the latter’s struggle for survival against an enemy sworn to exterminate Israel, and to do so without regard for the deaths and destruction to its own people.

“Defense officials” claim otherwise.

Austin was frustrated because the US didn’t have enough time to position its forces to potentially come to Israel’s defense or to protect nearby US troops, defense officials said.

Would these “nearby US troops” be the same US troops Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris insists aren’t there? The Navy’s fleets positioned in the Mediterranean Sea, Gulf of Aden, and the Arabian Sea can’t do the job of “coming to Israel’s defense?” “Defense officials” aren’t even trying to be serious. Austin, along with the Biden-Harris administration in general, just want to control Israel’s behavior.

It would be all right if this administration devoted as much effort to reigning in the terrorists and their arms and money supplier, Iran, as they do trying to keep one or both of Israel’s hands…restrained.

Always Someone Else’s Fault

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party President candidate Kamala Harris is blaming Congress for her and Biden’s administration’s failure to control our border. 60 Minutes interviewer Bill Whitaker asked a question of Harris:

You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers, and that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?

Harris’ answer, in part:

Fast forward to a moment when a bipartisan group of members of the United States Senate, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, got together, came up with a border security bill.

She omitted to mention that for all that Senator James Lankford (R, OK), the “most conservative” Senator in question, was part of that deal, it would have codified the entry of more than 1.4 million unvetted illegal aliens into our nation. Lankford was hoodwinked in that deal.

Harris also omitted to say, and Whitaker chose not to note in his question, that the right answer now was Joe Biden’s Executive Order, that he could have issued years ago.

Whitaker followed up:

“[T]here was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration,” and that “arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump.”
He then asked her: “Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?”

Harris’ answer, in part:

It’s a long-standing problem, and solutions are at hand, and from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.

She omitted to mention, and Whitaker omitted to ask, how then-President Donald Trump (R) was able to implement the restrictions that so thoroughly limited illegal alien influx, restrictions that were so thoroughly loosened. Trump inveighed Congress to act on immigration law, but he didn’t wait—he delivered Executive Orders that achieved the tight restrictions. It’s true enough that Congress is needed to codify those EOs, or something like them, but the EOs, for their duration, worked.

Nothing kept Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden from issuing the EO that he did, or issuing other EOs, to tighten the border as long ago as January 2021 (or leave the Trump EOs in place), and nothing kept his Vice President from pushing him to do any of that. Instead, Harris actively supported the the rescission of the Trump EOs and the resultant loosening of our border control.

But all that is Congress’ fault. With Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, it’s always somebody else’s fault; Party is never the cause of any failure.

Lies of Progressive-Democrats

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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.