Arrogance of a Progressive-Democratic Party Politician

Congressman Adam Smith (D, WA) is the only Party politician, so far, to claim to know of and to identify illegal orders issued by President Donald Trump (R).

Yeah, I think the order to blow up those boats in the Caribbean without any, you know, actual probable cause, national security justification, or any declaration of war or armed conflict by the US Congress, I think it is illegal. That’s a legitimate opinion to hold, and it’s a legitimate opinion to express.

With that, he gives the game away.

It is a legitimate opinion to hold, and it is an opinion legitimately expressed by most American citizens. Military members must get over a much higher bar in order to express their opinions of an order’s legality with a view to disobeying it or encouraging their fellows to disobey it.

The order must be adjudicated illegal, and the military member must be prepared to suffer the consequences of disobedience or of fomenting disobedience should a court determine the order legal. On the other hand, all of us citizens, all of our politicians, can yap away at will without consequence.

Smith’s opinion that an order is illegal does not make it so. That he does not recognize that in the context of the Six’ video those politicians are potentially seeking to foment disorder explicitly in the military ranks—which would be seditious—not in the political ranks, is demonstrative of Smith’s self-important arrogance.

Consolidating Bigotry

That’s what Progressive-Democrat and Socialist Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s Mayor-elect, is moving rapidly to do. By naming Tamika Mallory to his Committee on Community Safety, set up to transition NYC to his governance, Mamdani is consciously bringing antisemitic and racist bigotry into his city government.

Mallory is a Black Lives Matter activist, a Louis Farrakhan acolyte, and a close ally of Linda Sarsour. BLM is well-known for its racist and identity politics bigotry. (Its ties to communism strongly supports Mamdani’s socialism, also.) Farrakhan likens Jews to cockroaches and considers them evil incarnate. Sarsour is infamous for her trashing of Israel because of its Jewish nature and for her more general antisemitic bigotry.

NYC residents are about to reap what they’ve sown. For the next four years they are going to live in interesting times. In spades.

Globalism

New York City Mayor-elect and Progressive-Democrat and Socialist Zohran Mamdani has laid it out quite clearly. In his renewed statement that he would uphold an International Criminal Court (to which the US is not signatory) arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mamdani said this:

I’ve said time and again that I believe this is a city of international law, and being a city of international law means looking to uphold international law[.]

No. New York City is an American city, and so it is bound by American law. And that means that at the city level (at the State level, come to that), international law is irrelevant. In the case of the ICC, this is doubly so. With the US not being a part of the ICC or the treaty that created it, neither the ICC nor any of its warrants or rulings have any standing in the US.

Whatever one thinks of globalism, this is globalism run amok. This is how far to the left the Progressive-Democratic Party has gone.

A Thought on Marjorie Taylor Greene

The editors of The Wall Street Journal have one take on the Republican Congresswoman from Georgia, and they’re not far wrong.

Consider this riff in the video she taped to announce her early retirement in the New Year: “If I am cast aside by the President and the MAGA political machine and replaced by Neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Military Industrial War Complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can never, ever relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well.”
There you have the full anti-business, isolationist wing of the MAGA movement in all its efflorescence. Corporations are nefarious and must be politically controlled. Advocates for more defense spending are war profiteers. Donors to the GOP, at least those who don’t donate to her, aren’t real Americans.
And the rest of the world is something to be avoided.

The editors missed one characteristic of Greene, though. She claims she’s resigning from Congress with effect 5 January 2026 in order to avoid inflicting on her “sweet district” a costly and debilitating 2026 primary contest for the Republican Party’s nomination for her district’s Representative.

[I] do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election….

Greene could just as easily could have avoided that hurtful and hateful primary by announcing that she would not run for reelection while she would finish her current term in the House. She chose not to do that.

Greene also is a political coward.

It’s No Choice

President Donald Trump (R) has put on the table a piece agreement between Ukraine and Russia that, if it’s being accurately described, amounts to abject surrender by Ukraine to the barbarian. The arrangement calls for Ukraine to cede to the barbarian occupied Crimea and all of the Donbas, including both the currently occupied and the unconquered parts. Ukraine also would be forced to at least partially disarm and cap its standing army at two-thirds of its current complement, and Ukraine would be forever barred from entering into any sort of defensive alliance.

Even the US would lose in this. Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had agreed a deal wherein the US would develop Ukraine’s mineral deposits, including significant rare earths, in return for which the US would get a significant fraction of the outputs. Under the arrangement on offer now, we would lose access to those minerals and rare earths since the vast bulk of them are in the Donbas.

Zelenskyy addressed his people when presented with the peace “deal,” whatever it is in fact, and said that his nation, his people must choose between “dignity, or the risk of losing a key partner.”

If this “peace” thing is being described accurately in the press, Ukraine already has lost a key partner.