Category Archives: politics

Overcomplexifying

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European pundits are doing that vis-à-vis US-Ukraine relations, if Deutsche Welle is any example.  SecState Mike Pompeo is headed to Ukraine to discuss a number of items centered on how we can extend our support for and of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, and this is supposed to be an especially complicated visit.

Analysts say Ukraine has become “toxic” for the US [based on the current impeachment/trial process of President Donald Trump], and that contacts at various levels have become more difficult and more restrained.

Leave aside the question of what analysts—these are carefully unnamed—and the question of who in either administration are saying contacts are more difficult and restrained, and there’s nothing left in this claim. There’s only the fact that our head diplomat after the President is headed there, just a few short months after the last contact between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that it extends beyond just government officials. Two former prosecutor generals in Ukraine, Viktor Shokin and Yuri Lutsenko, both discussed the Biden case with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani….

Not further complicated at all by this. This bit is wholly irrelevant to Pompeo’s trip; the complication exists only in the minds of those anonymous analysts.

The posts of Special Envoy to Ukraine and Ambassador to Ukraine remaining vacant is hardly a complication, either. The Special Envoy isn’t required (and never was), and the embassy is ably handled by the deputy ambassador and the ambassadorial staff in Kyev. Sure, it would be useful to fill the Ambassador slot, but nothing is held up by its being empty.

Even the disagreement between Pompeo and a newsperson is being held up by these pundits as a complicating factor. Never mind that that is a purely domestic matter or that members of this administration—and prior ones—are involved in disagreements with our press as a matter of routine.

There’s this, too:

The Minsk peace accords are bound to be one of the central issues during Pompeo’s visit to Kyiv. At a summit in Paris in December 2019, Washington praised Zelenskiy’s efforts to restart the faltering peace process. In the coming weeks, Ukraine will implement political agreements concerning the special status of the separatist areas around the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, and prepare for local elections scheduled for the fall. In the past, people took to the streets to protest the agreements, calling the accord a “surrender” to Russia.

Minsk is, indeed, Merkel’s betrayal of Ukraine and at best a partial surrender by Ukraine to Russia.  What should govern the situation is the prior Budapest Memorandum, a collection of three agreements in which the US, Russia, and the UK guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity if the latter gave up the nuclear weapons the Soviet Union had stationed there prior to its collapse and disappearance. Ukraine did, bringing the guarantee into effect. That Germany was not a signatory does not make Merkel’s betrayal any less; that only made it easier.

Russia subsequently welched and invaded Ukraine, partitioning and occupying Crimea and two eastern oblasts.  The Obama administration then betrayed Ukraine by refusing to answer Russia’s invasion and further by refusing to give/lease/sell/transfer in any way the weaponry Ukraine needed to resist the Russian invasion and defeat it.

This is the situation Trump and Pompeo are trying to repair.  None of those pseudo-complications have anything to do with any of this.

Gun Control

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is a strong fan of gun control to the point of, ultimately, seizing all of our guns.  He’s even running a Super Bowl ad to that effect. Tim O’Brien, one of Bloomberg’s senior campaign advisors even says about the ad and its gun control subject,

This [gun question] is something that touches families. It most profoundly touches communities of color.

You bet it does. Gun control was something enormously expanded by the Democratic Party to disarm newly freed blacks so they could more easily be lynched by the Democratic Party’s KKK.

Now the Progressive-Democratic Party, and its leading politicians, want to continue that disarmament; they want to prevent blacks, and Hispanics in this 21st century, from being able to defend their families from thugs; they want to maintain gun free zones so people of any skin color or religion are unable to defend themselves.

Nothing to See Here

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Recall that in the aftermath of an initial Flynn pushback against the charges against him, the prosecutors in his case withdrew their recommendation for a lenient sentence and demanded significant jail time.  Recall further that in response to that, Army Lt Gen (ret) Michael Flynn has moved formally to withdraw his guilty plea with an excoriating list of prosecutorial and FBI transgressions as his grounds.

Among the misbehaviors listed in Flynn’s plea withdrawal motion are

  • no actual record of Flynn’s statements to FBI agents exists
  • the original handwritten FD-302 witness report from a critical FBI interview is “missing”
  • subsequent versions of that 302 have been “edited” by allegedly anti-Trump FBI officials

In response, those same prosecutors now have withdrawn their harsher sentence demand and said they’d accept probation and no jail time.

They’ve been caught persecuting Flynn rather than prosecuting him, and they don’t want to have that exposed in open court. They’re hoping they can buy off Flynn with this latest move.

Move along.

Criminalizing Speech

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That’s what a Progressive-Democrat President Elizabeth Warren would try to do.

She would also lead a charge to criminalize the mere spreading of false information about the process of voting in US elections.
“I will push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote[.]

She masquerades her initial move as a criminalization of false claims concerning when and how to vote, but she ignores the fact that it’s already illegal to interfere with an election; there’s no need for additional laws.  She also declined, as Progressive-Democrats do regarding all efforts to regulate, to identify her limiting principle.

This is just an opening move to a broader speech censorship effort by the Left.

The…foolishness…of such an effort is illustrated by commentary concerning her plan. Senator Rand Paul (R, KY):

Would this apply to the tall tales you tell and those networks allow @ewarren?

Jeff Blehar of the National Review:

Elizabeth Warren is an American Indian. Go ahead Liz, charge me.

No, this is yet another example of the utter contempt in which Progressive-Democrats hold us deplorable average Americans. We’re just too stupid to do our own sorting of accurate speech from inaccurate speech from deliberately inaccurate speech. Our Betters must do this for us.

It’s also a very short step from there to criminalizing all speech of which this or that party disapproves, and from there it’s an even shorter step to criminalizing all speech of which this or that person in power disapproves.

Green Card Residency

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The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote (I’m tempted to say “party line vote,” but CJ Roberts might demur were he not otherwise occupied at the moment), lifted a district court’s stay blocking implementation of the Trump administration’s public charge immigration rule. The rule blocks permanent residency and allows for denial of entry visas in the first place for those in our nation or entering it if they are considered likely to rely on our welfare programs. The stay removal allows the rule to be enforced while the underlying case wends its way through the courts.

Europe, exemplified by Deutsche Welle, is dismayed (even as many of the EU’s members demur from accepting immigrants making their passage from northern Africa).  It’s a harsher immigration law.  It significantly expands the criteria for denying legal residency. It disproportionately put[s] permanent residency out of reach for low-income applicants from developing countries.

The stay-issuing district judge, George Daniels, is in a high dudgeon, too. He wrote in his ruling that the rule was repugnant to the American Dream, and was a policy of exclusion in search of justification.

Last things first. The district judge was—and is—completely out of line in his ruling. His task, his duty as an American judge, is to find the law underlying the rule, or the rule itself, unconstitutional or, failing that, to apply the underlying law and the rule as they are written. Full stop.

Our Constitution and the judge’s oath of office, which enjoins him to uphold our Constitution, bar him from implementing his personal opinion or his personal view of what’s good or bad for our society.

Regarding the alleged disproportional impact on the poor or on third-world applicants, that may or may not be true. However, as is the case with all nations, those entering ours are expected to be beneficial to our nation, not drains on it.

On the beef that the rule makes it harder for an entrant to gain legal residency, that’s the point of borders. No one has an inherent right to come into another nation without that nation’s prior permission. No nation has an inherent obligation to grant that permission. Entry requirements and entrants are solely at the discretion of that nation.

Nor have we any obligation to extend the benefits of our already overstretched (and too inefficiently run) welfare programs to noncitizens. Such an extended overstretch can only work to the detriment of our citizens.