Tag Archives: government

I Disagree with Freeman

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James Freeman, of The Wall Street Journal, has an op-ed out in which he says President Joe Biden should basically stay out of the public’s eye and not speak to us of important things.

For a while this column has been urging President Joe Biden to avoid public speaking, at least when the topic is important.

And

This column’s argument for the president to stick with prepared statements is not intended…as an ad hoc solution to the president’s reckless habit of making odd off-the-cuff statements about nuclear-armed powers.

I disagree. Biden should interact with the press—take questions without his handlers present, in addition to speak to the press—on a daily basis and always on the record. This would let us average Americans get a more accurate picture of Biden’s ability to function in the rough and tumble ad hoc-ery of the real world, and it would be more informative of his fitness for office and for reelection than watching him occasionally fumble with his teleprompter.

We also need to hear his off-the-cuff remarks to/about anybody and any nation, not just nuclear-armed powers. These remarks are much more informative to us average Americans regarding Biden’s thinking on the subject than any carefully scripted commentary or equally carefully scripted answers to just as carefully pre-selected questions from the press.

Dodging a Bullet

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Think about the continued protests by abortion activists outside conservative Supreme Court Justices’ homes, protests nakedly intended to force those Justices to change their alleged votes on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, votes which might aggregate into significant alteration, if not reversal, of the Court’s prior ruling in Roe v Wade.

Keep in mind that those…protests…are intended to achieve their goal by terrorizing the Justices and, especially, their families.

Keep in mind, also, that both of those—protests to intimidate court officials into producing a particular outcome to a case, and terrorizing the targets of those so-called protests—are plainly illegal:

Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

The press is rife with videos of the protests and of the protestors. The protestors are easily identifiable in those videos. There are police present whose bodycams also would provide ample identification capability regarding those protestors.

The Department of Justice, though, is studiously silent and determinedly inactive on the matter. No arrests have been made. No indictment proceedings have been initiated. No one has been brought before a judge for arraignment.

Attorney General Merrick Garland is simply refusing to do his job and enforce the law.

We dodged a bullet when we managed to avoid having Garland on our Supreme Court. Imagine the destruction to law, to order, this man could have inflicted on our nation had he gotten that lifetime appointment. He’s being destructive enough in just one year and will wreak plenty of additional havoc on rule of law over his four-year term.

A Clear Difference

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Assume, for a moment, that the series of attacks inside Russian territory and unexplained explosions at Russian targets near the border with Ukraine have been carried out by Ukrainian forces and are not just examples of shoddy Russian maintenance or done by disgruntled Russian protestors.

Compare, then, that damage with the damage done by Russian attacks inside Ukraine. “Ukraine’s attacks” have been carefully limited to facilities supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s continued prosecution of its unprovoked attack.

  • a fuel depot in Russia’s Belgorod region directly opposite Kharkiv
  • an explosion sparked a blaze at an ammunition depot near the city of Belgorod
  • blasts have been reported inside the city
  • fires erupted at other oil depots, including one at a Russian military base
  • explosions have damaged rail lines in Kursk and Bryansk oblasts

Russian attacks, on the other hand, have been deliberately targeted at residential neighborhoods of Ukrainian cities, and have been aimed at deliberately razing whole cities to the ground (and of simply making the rubble bounce)—Kharkiv, Kherson, Izyum, Lyman, Bucha, Mariupol, to suggest a few—and nakedly, without regard for much of anything, attacking nuclear facilities at Zaporizhzhia or firing on “targets” very close to or having cruise missiles overfly the Yuzhnoukrainsk nuclear power plant near Kostyantynivka in southern Ukraine and the Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant near Netishyn in the northeast enroute to other targets, and blithely kicking up the potentially still lethal radioactive dirt around Chornobyl.

“We’re Not Sending Him”

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President Joe Biden (D) says he’s ready and willing to go to Ukraine and meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

However.

His Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, pooh-poohed the idea.

He’s ready for anything—the man likes fast cars and aviators[.]

Biden’s desire to go is just more thrill-seeking in the eyes of White House staffers.

Psaki went on:

He’s ready to go to Ukraine. We are not sending the president to Ukraine.

We are not sending the president. Think about that. Biden isn’t making the decision to travel to Ukraine and meet with Zelenskyy, or not, on his own initiative.

Many have suggested, over the last year, that Biden is a captive of the Extremist Left of his Leftist Party, but this statement by Psaki makes those suggestions statements of fact. The President of the United States is not his own man. Nor does he seem to be the one in charge in his own job.

Worse, Jill Biden is no Edith Bolling, and she’s not the one standing in for the man.

Lawless Press

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The Supreme Court issued a ruling Wednesday that the press doesn’t like, and the press is calling for President Joe Biden (D) to blithely ignore the ruling and go on about his business. By odd coincidence, the Court’s ruling reinstated a Trump administration rule that a lower court had struck down.

Democrats condemned the decision, but some reporters went even further and called for the Biden administration to ignore the Supreme Court.

For instance,

Former Niskanen Center Vice President for Research Will Wilkinson posted a Twitter thread explaining why he believes the White House should ignore SCOTUS decisions.

It’s been done before.

How many divisions has the Pope?

How’d Stalin’s question work out, in the end, for the Soviet Union?

And before that, regarding a John Marshall-led Supreme Court ruling on a Cherokee-Georgia dispute:

John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.

That worked out poorly, also.

Nevertheless, here’s the press calling for any lawful thing disagreeable to its convenience to be ignored.

The press doesn’t want us to be a nation of laws, but a nation of men who will decide on the basis of what’s convenient to the press’ progressive ideology.