Tag Archives: politics

Statesmanship

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The estimable editors of The Wall Street Journal spent an entire column dunking on Vice President JD Vance (R) and his foreign policy miscues. Buried in the text, though, were a couple of nuggets.

…hedge-fund magnate Ken Griffin, a major Republican donor, said he’d favor Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a matchup between the two for the 2028 GOP presidential nomination.

Unmentioned by the editors is that Rubio has already said he won’t run for the party’s nomination for President if Vance does, the plain subtext of which is he won’t risk dividing the party with such a contest. This is an assurance Vance has so far chosen not to offer.

And these, regarding the cease fire deal he thought he’d negotiated with the civilians in the Tehran branch of Iran’s government (the other branch being the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps):

I think that they see there’s a real opportunity here to turn over a new leaf so long as they do the right thing[.]
…
They want to have a much brighter future….

As the editors noted, though, the regime’s vision of a brighter future entails nuclear weapons that allow it to control the region, not prosperity for its people.

Vance’s misunderstanding of whose view of “right thing” actually was in play, along with his miss regarding whose vision was operating, are not just statesmanship misses, they’re failures of political acumen.

“Black Democrats Fight for Political Survival”

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The lede identifies the source of this political…confusion.

The Supreme Court’s decision to reinstate Alabama’s congressional map has split the political future for many Black Democratic voters.

Black Democratic voters. Not American voters favoring the Democratic Party who happen to be black.

And this:

In Montgomery, Democrats believe they still have a shot at keeping their seat….

Their seat. No. As Scott Brown nearly put it a few years ago, with all due respect, it’s not the black voters’ seat, it’s the voters’ seat. Nor is very much respect at all due the racist trope that the seat belongs to black voters exclusively.

Maybe these Progressive-Democrats should consider no longer running on their race, and instead run on their Party’s domestic, foreign, and economic policies instead. The rest of us, along with our courts (finally), have figured out that the critical opening phrases of our Declaration of Independence and the opening Article of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution really do mean what they say.

Who Can Afford Obamacare?

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The lede:

Rates for many Affordable Care Act plans rose by double digits this year. Insurers want to do the same next year.

It’s especially bad in Progressive-Democrat-run States. For instance:

In Washington state, Centene is asking for a 28% hike, after boosting rates by 35% in 2026. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois wants 15%—on top of a 28% increase this year.

Who can afford Obamacare? Nobody. Not the individual, not the nation at large. That’s what those unconscionable Federal subsidies, only recently cut back, kept hidden for so long, at the Progressive-Democratic Party government dependency pushers’ behest. Dependency is votes, as they’ve long known.

It’s time the Republican Party stopped dithering and cowering. The party needs to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with an interstate commerce-centric, lightly regulated (which would entail rescinding a double potful of regulations) free market for health insurance, one in which insurers could offer plans that customers actually want, and at competition-driven prices and deductibles, and coverages. Especially that last would drive costs down. Plans that don’t try to cover everything, unless that’s what enough customers want to make a market, plans that cover only a few things, that cover only catastrophic medical events, and every coverage level in between—whatever the customers want in sufficient aggregate to make a market.

Dispositive Indication of Party’s Extremism

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In an article concerning Maine’s Progressive-Democratic Party nominee for the US Senate, Graham Platner, and whether he should drop out of the fall election contest over an allegation of rape (coming on the heels of a number of women who’ve said he’d been abusive toward them), there is this statement:

Over the last 24 hours, some of Platner’s advisers have been guiding him on what a withdrawal from the race would look like and helping him figure out a way to get a candidate and a selection process he could support, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

[A] candidate and a selection process he [Platner] could support. That’s a pretty definitive statement of the control over the Progressive-Democratic Party that the socialists have, and it demonstrates pretty clearly how socialism has become the center of Party and how Party Establishment has been relegated to Party’s extremist right (even as Party’s Establishment remains plainly Left Wing relative to American politics and voters).

And, just to emphasize that point, which even includes those wanting Platner to drop out, here’s Joseph Geevarghese, who is the Executive Director of Our Revolution, the progressive organization that socialist, but nominally Independent, Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) generated:

To the Democratic establishment: this is not your opening. Mainers did not vote by an overwhelming margin against Janet Mills and the DSCC’s handpicked candidate just to be handed another status-quo candidate.

It’s hard to get any clearer than that.

Update: In the realization, Platner withdrew.

I intend to file my paperwork to withdraw,” he added. “The process needs to assure that what comes next is reflective of the Mainers, who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics.

As Dana Loesch put it in her newsletter,

As the truth unraveled so did Platner’s polling. A recent NYT poll showed incumbent Susan Collins leading Platner with working class voters by 21 points, expanded more by narrowing it to white working class voters. Women, Hispanics, and other demos began sliding fast. Democrats couldn’t afford Platner hurting them in the midterms, too.

This is Party.

Revolution vs Evolution

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The opening two paragraphs lay out the question regarding the nature of warfare:

The way wars are fought is changing fast, as new technologies upend military doctrines on everything from procurement to executing operations.
But just how radical will this transformation be in years to come? And are the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested by the US, its allies and rivals in new tanks, planes and warships going to become the equivalent of buying horses and arrows on the eve of machine guns and howitzers?

Germany’s Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, General Carsten Breuer, added to the question:

The character of warfare is changing fundamentally. Armed forces must be able to adapt faster, integrate new technologies, and learn at speed. If we fail to adapt, we will not be able to prevail.

And Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington:

Revolutions in warfare are often declared but rarely arrive. Most military developments, like the current trends in the use of drones and precision strikes, are evolutionary. Nobody doubts the impact of gunpowder, but it was on the battlefield for hundreds of years, alongside knights and pikemen.

And this:

Military leaders, governments, and defense companies disagree on whether to call the current developments a revolution that warrants a complete overhaul of existing doctrines.

It’s a silly, time- and resource-wasting question. The situation neither demands nor holds unnecessary the idea of completely overhauling existing doctrines. It does, though, demonstrate—demand—the need to completely review, from the ground up de novo all existing doctrines and to do so periodically.

What matters, rather, is this constant: the need to manage and keep up with, even to drive, the pace of change, and that pace today is far faster than that prior rate of moving from pikes and trebuchets to rifles and cannons, far faster than the pace of weapons, logistics, tactics, and strategies during the world’s last major set-piece war, in the last century. The pace, rapidly accelerating, also is expanding into the constitution of warfare and the nature of war itself.

The question of whether we can make necessary changes across all dimensions of conflict, from political to information to economic to cyber to kinetic—and across the logistics and maintenance aspects of each of them—faster than our enemies can then becomes the Critical Item of national survival, as demonstrated from as far back as Alexander the Great and his weapons development and use and his tactics; the Roman way of war compared with that of the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians; and the tactics change demonstrated by the Spanish tercio.

Each of these areas of pacing also has a Do Loop that must be capable of moving apace, from recognition of a situation; through decision regarding how to respond, or better, preempt; to acting on that decision. Our Do Loops—all of them—need to be capable of operating inside of—faster than—our enemies’. If they evolve and adapt faster than we do, then we lose, and they win.

Revolution vs evolution is an irrelevancy.