Category Archives: politics

“Some Feel It’s About Time for a US Retreat”

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That’s the title of Friday’s Wall Street Journal Letters column.  One letter argues that point in particular.  The letter writer is mostly wrong, but his is right on one matter.

Who does he think will fill in behind us if we retreat?  It won’t be our friends; that should be clear.

On the other hand, he argued

The USSR no longer exists and China has emerged as our chief rival. The only thing that has remained constant is America’s footing the greater part of the bill for military defense, while nations we protect continue to grow rich at our expense.
The nations of the world that we are supposed to protect are going their own way, while we continue to spend and spend in the name of preserving an alliance that is no longer even necessary.

The USSR no longer exists, but Russia does, and it’s as much a threat to us and to those it’s in our national interest to support and protect as is the People’s Republic of China.  Many of the nations we are protecting are going their own way, it’s true enough: too many of the western European members of NATO don’t feel the need to contribute to NATO’s costs or equipment and manpower suites for their own mutual defense.  However, other members, and many eastern European nations who aren’t NATO members (but are ex-Soviet occupied nations), do feel the threat and are willing to contribute to their mutual defense.

The letter writer also is right on this: we should consider reducing our effort and spending regarding those western European nations that don’t care.

We then should redirect those resources to working with the other nations who do care.  If that takes a (major) revamp of NATO or a new mutual defense arrangement that’s centered on those other nations, then so be it.

Shades

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US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has new ambassadorial digs, and those digs have new curtains.  The rent for the digs is 58 large each month, and the curtains were almost $53k.  If you think those numbers are outlandish for some office space and window coverings, you’re right.

Then we get The New York Times castigating her for spending that kind of taxpayer money.  Never mind that the NYT carefully buried some key facts regarding these expenses.  Facts like it being the Obama administration that committed to the rent and that bought the curtains; Haley had no say in the matter. Facts like the rent in particular, to Obama’s credit, being much lower than other administrations have spent on their UN ambassador’s digs.

Jeez.  At least the NYT‘s sister tabloids, National Enquirer, Globe, Star, et al., have some entertainment value.

Jumped the Shark

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The Progressive-Democratic Senator from San Francisco, Dianne Feinstein, has done it.  The Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee has “released a memo” purported to cast doubt on Judge and Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s character.

This is a memo, too, that she’s been sitting on for the last couple of months, waiting for just the right time to “release” it.  Its source is secret, though, and its contents are not to be revealed to the public.  Her cronies at The New York Times, never fear, claim to have the…skinny…on the content: in a textbook example of projection, that outlet hints that the “memo” is all about sexual misbehavior.

Sadly, Feinstein has only shown her truth with this.  And it’s entirely consistent with her handling of her fellow Committee member Kamala Harris’ outright lie about a thing she claims Kavanaugh said.  She’s chosen to do nothing about that lie, even though she is Harris’ Ranking Member.  She’s also chosen to do nothing about fellow Committee member Corey Booker’s willfully unethical, if not illegal, behavior with Committee documents.  Of course, she’s on less firm ground there, since she earlier unethically released Committee documents (and then claimed that “cold medicine” made her do it).

Unable to disagree with him on his fitness to be a Justice of the Supreme Court, Progressive-Democrats are stooped to trying to smear his good name.

Go figure.

He Didn’t Build That

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Our economy had the awe-uninspiring growth rate of 2% per year during ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) time in office.  Now, the Census Bureau has reported that

  • [r]eal median household incomes rose 1.8% to $61,372 between 2016 and 2017
  • the overall poverty rate dropped 0.4 per centage points to 12.3%
  • poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics fell to 21.2% and 18.3%, respectively, the lowest in more than 45 years
  • the share of people earning less than $15,000 declining 0.3 per centage points

Obama didn’t build that.  Those folks also think they’ve reached the point where they’ve made enough money.

On the other hand, Obama, his Progressive-Democrat cronies, and his regulators did create the very low economic baseline against which those per centages are being measured.

Book or Smear?

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Bob Woodward wrote a book about President Donald Trump, and his “on-the-record” sources are coming out of the…woodwork…to deny they said the things Woodward claims they said or that they were misrepresented in misleading ways (redundancy deliberate).

I have to ask: does Woodward have any “on the record” sources about whom he hasn’t seemed to have lied? He claims to have tapes and transcripts of those conversations and of his claimed conversations with anonymous “sources.”

Regarding the latter, he should explain why we should believe anonymous sources who’ve demonstrated their dishonesty by speaking against their terms of employment if not their oaths of office.

Publish the tapes and transcripts, or there’s no reason to believe they exist.  If they don’t exist, there’s no reason to believe those “on the record” sources were honestly cited or that those anonymous “sources” actually exist.

Sadly, even the Wall Street Journal‘s author of the piece at the link, Rebecca Ballhaus, has chosen to go along with Woodward’s game.  Citing a statement by Rob Porter in which he said he was struck by the selective and often misleading portrait in the book, she wrote,

Mr Porter didn’t dispute any specific elements….

Gary Cohn said in a separate statement that that the book does not accurate[ly] portray my experience at the White House.  Ballhaus again:

He, too, didn’t dispute any specific anecdotes.

This is a cynically misleading over-parsing of their statements, carefully designed to leave the impression that Woodward’s claims are true, just because the two men chose not to enumerate and explicitly deny every jot and tittle of Woodward’s missive.