Category Archives: politics

Unify Our Way, Or Else

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Cenk Uygur thinks we all should just meekly acquiesce to what four first-year House Progressive-Democrats tell us to do.  First, he says

Nearly everyone in Washington seems to assume that progressives should shut up, accept their place, and unify around the status quo. Think about what an arrogant and preposterous request that is.

Then he says

We signed up to rout him [President Donald Trump] and send him home. If you’re not on board with that, get out of the way and let us do it.

Wow. Think about what an arrogant and preposterous request that is.

Then he had a long screed about how “voters” wanted us to do things his way because his four folks in particular got themselves elected.  Out of 235 Progressive-Democrats in the House.

Talk about oblivious. But this is the self-absorbedly arrogant, do it our way and the rest of America just shut up, government we’ll have if the Progressive-Democratic Party gets majorities in the House and Senate and control of the White House.

PRC, “Armored Weapons,” and Hong Kong

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Recall the People’s Republic of China’s use of tanks to suppress the Tiananmen Square protests that resulted in some 2,000 civilian deaths.

Here’s the PRC’s new anti-protest armor: truncheons.  With the official police standing around, watching:

Media in Hong Kong have released footage of masked men in white shirts beating black-clad protesters with steel pipes and wooden poles in a subway station and on public transit. The protesters attempted to defend themselves with umbrellas.
Passengers said police did not intervene in Sunday’s attacks by the men, which left 45 people injured.

Forty-five injured by those truncheon-wielders.  Notice, too, that the thugs were masked, but the protestors were not afraid to show their faces.

Were the masks to conceal their Beijing origin?  The opposition party in Hong Kong, the Democratic Party, is taking (publicly, at least) a more generous position.  It’s investigating

the attacks amid suspicion that they involved the triad, a Chinese organized crime group.

I’m not so sanguine; although I don’t discount the idea that, rather than being sent by PRC President Xi Jinping’s supporters from the mainland, Xi caused the triad to be hired for the strong-arming.

Sanctions on Turkey?

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That’s the question being asked regarding Turkey’s decision to buy—and subsequently to take delivery on—Russia’s AS-400 anti-aircraft missile system and the impact that has, or should have, on our alliance with Turkey.

The question, though, assumes we have an alliance. Formally, one exists, but it’s in name only outside of NATO (and with Turkey cozying up to Russia, that one is in flux, too); Turkey has chosen functionally to walk away from any bilateral arrangement.

I think, though, the decision to cancel Turkey’s F-35 buy is sufficient. We don’t need to apply sanctions; we don’t need to have much of anything to do with Turkey, good or bad, outside our NATO obligations.

Turkey just isn’t that important to us.  It’s a convenient path into the Middle East, but even that is questionable.  Turkey, after all, refused to let us operate from there during the second invasion of Iraq, in contrast with Saudi Arabia’s and Kuwait’s active support.  That refusal complicated military matters and led to a longer fight than necessary, with higher casualties all around.

Campaign Fund Raising

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It seems the RNC raised a ton more money in June than did the DNC.

The Democratic National Committee raised $8.5 million in June, the month of the party’s presidential debates in Miami—less than half of the $20.7 million the Republican National Committee pulled in during that time period, new disclosures show.

I’d be cautious about reading much into that, though.  For one thing, it’s a one-month snapshot, and the fund-raising season will last into the fall of 2020 (I suspect money raised after September won’t mean much).

More importantly, though, the situations between parties are different at this point in the campaign.  Progressive-Democrats are spreading their campaign donations among the DNC and forty-leven Presidential candidates.  Republicans, on the other hand, are more concentrated: the RNC and one candidate.

A more telling statistic is accumulated cash on hand:

The DNC…finished the month with $9.3 million cash on hand. The RNC is meanwhile building a larger war chest during the lead-up to 2020 and had $43.5 million cash on hand at the end of the month.

However, this also is subject to the caveat about the number of candidates also collecting party-favoring donations.

It’d be more instructive to see the numbers for all the candidates and national committees aggregated by party.

Nationalism

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In his Wall Street Journal piece on this, Christopher DeMuth (Hudson Institute Distinguished Fellow) had this:

the nationalist claim is…government has abdicated basic responsibilities…:

failed to secure national borders and provide regular procedures for immigration and assimilation.

delegated lawmaking to foreign and international bodies, and domestic bureaucracies…

…acquiesced in, or actively promoted, the splintering of the nation into contending racial, religious and other groups and has favored some at the expense of others.

On the contrary, these aren’t abdications. The first two are by Progressive-Democrat design. The third is a deliberately wielded tool of the Progressive-Democrats to achieve the first two.

One has only to hear the bigoted spew of Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Pressley, Omar to understand this. One has only to see the Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates, almost to a man, favor decriminalizing illegal entry into our nation, and then giving illegal aliens free health care at our expense. One has only to see the Progressive-Democrat Congressmen do their best to block funding for supporting our borders.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines nationalism as

The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals.
The belief that a particular cultural or ethnic group constitutes a distinct people deserving of political self-determination.

There are no downsides to nationalism.