Tag Archives: politics

Congressman Jordan Demurs

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Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) has declined Congressman and Chairman of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol Bennie Thompson’s (D, MS) “request” to appear before that J6 committee. His letter carrying his decision to Thompson laid the matter out in no uncertain terms.

Leaving aside Jordan’s notice that the J6 committee’s summons of Jordan (and of Congressman Scott Perry (R, PA), I add) is an assault (Jordan used “pry”) on a sitting Congressman’s deliberative process informing a Member about legislative matters before the House is an outrageous abuse of the Select Committee’s authority, he laid out a number of other reasons for his decision.

As you well know, I have no relevant information that would assist the Select Committee in advancing any legitimate legislative purpose. I cannot speak to Speaker Pelosi’s failure to ensure the appropriate security posture at the Capitol complex in advance of well-publicized protests on January 6, 2021. I cannot elaborate on former US Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund’s statement that a concern about “optics”—following widespread calls from Democrats in 2020 to defund the police—contributed to the limited security response. I have nothing to add to the bipartisan, comprehensive findings of the Senate investigative committees or to those issued by federal inspectors general. I cannot testify about the Justice Department’s ongoing law-enforcement efforts, although I am aware of reports that the FBI has determined the violence was not coordinated or part of any “organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.”

Jordan, in his letter, also took notice that the J6 committee seems superfluous (my term), since House Democrats have already determined the committee’s outcome:

House Democrats have already prejudged the results of the Select Committee’s work, declaring in their February 2021 impeachment brief that President Trump is “unmistakabl[y]” responsible for the events of January 6. Democrats have accused their Republican colleagues of “sedition” and called them “traitors” for objecting to Electoral College results in certain states—an official action taken pursuant to federal law, and the same objections that you and other senior House Democrats made following the 2000, 2004, and 2016 presidential elections.

He also laid out individual Progressive-Democrat committee members’ dishonesty:

  • In a widely distributed letter, you falsely accused former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik of attending a meeting in Washington on January 5, 2021, when Kerik was actually in New York City.
  • During a business meeting to consider holding our former colleague Mark Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress, Representative Adam Schiff, a member of the Select Committee, doctored a text message I had forwarded to Mr. Meadows.
  • During the floor debate on the Meadows criminal contempt resolution, Representative Jamie Raskin, another member of the Select Committee, falsely attributed a second text message to a “lawmaker” when in fact it was not sent by any Member of Congress.

Jordan is being polite. Speaker Pelosi’s (D, CA) J6 committee is not just the cudgel for smearing Republicans that he terms it; it’s a kangaroo court being used to assault an opposition party and attempt to delegitimize it through innuendo, ad hominem, and outright lie.

Jordan’s letter can be read here via Fox News.

Iran’s Nuclear Weapons

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With the pseudo-negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program going the way they are, President Joe Biden, of the Biden-Harris Presidency, is rapidly coming to the first of two moments of truth.

The first is whether Biden-Harris will fold in the talks—he is, after all, consigned by the Ayatollah to the kiddie table where he’s to be seen and not heard by the adults in the room—and give Khamenei everything he wants just so Biden-Harris can come home claiming a deal, however disastrous.

That, though, is a moment of lesser truth. The greater truth moment will come after. As Dubowitz and Kroenig put it in their op-ed at the link,

A nuclear-armed Iran would cause further proliferation as regional powers like Saudi Arabia build their own bombs.

But that’s a lesser truth, also, for all that it’s a greater one than the first. Dubowitz and Kroenig also have this:

It might take a year or two to fashion a functioning nuclear warhead that is deliverable on a missile, but once the clerical regime has enough weapons-grade material, the game is over.

The nuclear warhead doesn’t have to be delivered via missile, though. There are a variety of ways to…truck…such device into Israel.

In the event, too, Iran is likely to wait until it has four or five nuclear warheads, since that is what it will take—and all it will take—to destroy Israel as a polity and as a people. And Iran will strike the moment that fourth or fifth weapon becomes operational.

Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former President of Iran and then-Chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council, on World Al-Qods Day in 2001, as cited by the Middle East Media Research Institute:

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

And here is the greatest moment of truth for Biden-Harris. Will he, can he, make

the fateful choice between allowing the clerical regime to become a nuclear-weapons power and using military force to stop it.

Will he make the military strike that Dubowitz and Kroenig suggest will be necessary to prevent Iran’s getting nuclear weapons?

Sadly, Biden-Harris doesn’t have it in him to make the strike. The most we can hope for, and it’s a very thin reed given his and his Progressive-Democratic Party’s open hostility toward Israel, is that Biden-Harris will stay out of the way and let Israel and Saudi Arabia (the latter very sub rosa) conduct the strike.

Brinkmanship

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ME Sarotte thinks Putin has bought into the concept of a 30-year-old betrayal of a commitment by a past US President to a past Russian President to not expand NATO east to include nations that used to be under Soviet domination. Sarotte says that’s the basis for Putin’s current brinkmanship; he’s merely trying to redress that betrayal, as NATO has, indeed, accepted erstwhile Soviet-dominated (even occupied) nations into NATO.

I think it’s hard to take seriously Sarotte’s view. More likely, it seems to me, is that Putin merely is putting that out as a public rationale. The most likely case for his seeming brinkmanship is that Putin doesn’t see his behavior as brinkmanship at all. On the contrary, he’s convinced—rightly or wrongly—that Biden-Harris will fold in the moment of truth.

Widening Gyre of Hostages

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In response to Lithuania’s effrontery in contradicting the People’s Republic of China by letting the Republic of China open a “representative office” in the capital city of Vilnius, the PRC not only is banning import into the PRC of Lithuanian products, it’s banning import of all products that contain Lithuanian components. As The Wall Street Journal dryly put it,

The effects are rippling across Europe.

And already Germany is intimating its desire for surrender, which should come as no surprise from a nation already openly obsequious before Russia:

The German-Baltic Chamber of Commerce has warned Vilnius that German subsidiaries are at risk.

The widening gyre may well spread across the pond.

In the US, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would bar goods made with forced labor in Xinjiang region from entering America, passed the House last month. If it becomes law, US companies should brace themselves.

It’s an open question whether the Progressive-Democrat running the Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), and the President, Biden-Harris, will permit the bill to become law, or whether one of the other will join Germany as hostage and bar the law.

Elisabeth Braw concluded this in her op-ed at the link:

China’s punishment of Lithuania is a wake-up call for companies and countries alike.

Indeed.

It’s time for Europe and the US to stop doing business with the PRC altogether.

The transition will be deucedly expensive, but Europe and the US will be orders of magnitude better off not being as dependent on the PRC as the PRC’s actions are demonstrating us both to be.

That cost, and the reduction in our economic and political freedom of action, which the PRC will continue to inflict will only get far worse, the longer we delay in carrying out that transition.

In the meantime, it would do us and Lithuania, and all other nations wishing to reduce their dependency on the PRC, a world of good for us to increase our trade with Lithuania.

More Threats

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Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, ahead of the upcoming Geneva “talks” regarding Russia and Ukraine, has instructed President Joe Biden (D) that he, Biden, must answer for the Russian’s demands vis-à-vis Ukraine and Europe, and do so promptly.

We need to figure out quite rapidly whether there is a basis to work on some of those issues. Our military will be there, and then we will see whether there is any basis to continue on a diplomatic track.

And

I cannot exclude negative effects on some arms-control arrangements we maintain with the US, and a big question would be put on the advisability to continue the strategic security dialogue[.]

And, paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal,

Mr Ryabkov said that if diplomatic efforts fail, the Russian president would look into options prepared by his military experts.

The WSJ headlined its article Russia’s Demands on Ukraine Must Be Addressed Urgently, Russian Official Says.

In one respect, Ryabkov is right. It’s growing ever more urgent that the US, and NATO, answer the Russian’s demands. It’s absolutely imperative that the US, and NATO, send defensive and offensive weapons to Ukraine and train those soldiers to use them. It’s growing ever more urgent that the US, and NATO, begin air defense and ground force joint exercises in Ukraine. It’s growing ever more urgent that the US redeploy its forces not involved in joint training, particularly those currently in Germany, into southeastern and northwestern Poland and to move naval forces into the Baltic Sea to within striking range of Kaliningrad.

It’s critical to apply, now, economic sanctions against Russian officials, from Vladimir Putin, through his cronies in the Kremlin, down through his cronies in the Duma, and economic sanctions against the state of Russia.

Waiting until Russia invades will be too late.