Tag Archives: responsibilities

A Stolen Laptop

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Senator Jeff Merkley (D, OR), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Senate Appropriations committees, has reported that his laptop was stolen from his office, ostensibly by the rioters who assaulted the Capital Building last Wednesday afternoon. (Ostensibly: frankly, I have no reason to doubt the fact of the theft or which member(s) of which crowd did the theft. However, the deed as theft and who did it remain unproven at this early stage of the investigation.)

Merkley also said he’d left his office unlocked while he went to the Senate floor for the Electoral College vote counting and debates. The importance of that will become clear below.

He apparently isn’t alone in this:

The Justice Department (DOJ) said Thursday during a briefing that “national security equities” may have been among the records stolen during the looting and destruction that stalled the congressional proceedings….

What’s not being reported in the NLMSM is the utter contempt these folks—possibly from both parties—have for our nation’s secrets, our classified information: they won’t even take the slightest pains to protect them.

A laptop unsecured in an unlocked office? Not even in locked away in a safe when the Senator isn’t around? An open office is all the security a Senator—a Senator experienced in handling classified materials, if only by his membership on a foreign relations committee—deems necessary?

Classified “equities” left unsecured in other offices?

How does that work, exactly?

Where are DoJ’s and DIA’s investigations into this manifest mishandling of classified material?

“Fight Like Hell”

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President Donald Trump incited the assault on the Capital Building last Wednesday—or so say Progressive-Democrats, the NLMSM, and the Left generally—with those words.

Here’s the definition of “fight,” per Merriam-Webster:

intransitive verb
1  a : to contend in battle or physical combat especially : to strive to overcome a person by blows or weapons
The soldiers fought bravely.
b : to engage in boxing
He will fight for the heavyweight title next month.
2 : to put forth a determined effort
They were fighting to stay awake.

transitive verb
1  a(1) : to contend against in or as if in battle or physical combat
fought the invaders of his homeland
was fighting a forest fire
(2) : to box against in the ring
fought several strong contenders
b(1) : to attempt to prevent the success or effectiveness of the company fought the takeover attempt
(2) : to oppose the passage or development of fight a bill in Congress
2 a : wage, carry on
fight a battle
   b : to take part in (a boxing match or similar contest)
3 : to struggle to endure or surmount
fight a cold
is fighting cancer
4 a : to gain by struggle
fights his way through
b : to resolve by struggle
fought out their differences in court
5 a : to manage (a ship) in a battle or storm
b : to cause to struggle or contend
c : to manage in an unnecessarily rough or awkward manner

Notice how many of these definitions have to do with physical combat and how many have to do with metaphorically and nonviolently carrying on the struggle.

Those Progressive-Democrats, the NLMSM, and the Left generally are projecting their own propensity for physical violence as the means of getting their way.

And they’re doing it while having downplayed the violence and destruction of the Left’s riots in Minneapolis, New York City, Chicago, Portland, and Seattle over the summer.

Never mind that the importance of the invasion of the Capital Building flows from its status as a symbol—and it’s a hugely important symbol. The damage done the Capital Building, however, is debris in the streets after those summer riots, which burned whole neighborhoods, destroyed businesses, crushed Americans’ ability to earn their living. And that destruction was aimed at minorities in particular. And that destruction was repeatedly billed as largely peaceful, a pent-up frustration being released, as reparations.

Vaccination Shortfall

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The Trump administration promised 20 million doses of the Wuhan Virus vaccine would be delivered to the States by the end of 2020. In fact, only 12-14 million doses were delivered. That’s a significant shortfall—or it would be were it not for a far more significant shortfall that renders the lacking 6-8 million doses wholly irrelevant.

…far fewer people than expected are being immunized against Covid-19, as the process moves slower than officials had projected and has been beset by confusion and disorganization in many states.
…
Of the more than 12 million doses of vaccines from Moderna Inc and Pfizer Inc with BioNTech SE that have been shipped, only 2.8 million have been administered, according to federal figures.

Never mind that the States had been told for months that vaccines would be available and that vaccine doses would be available in those millions by the end of the year.

The States chose not to act; their administrations chose to disbelieve the Federal administration, and so they sat on their hands. Claire Hannan, Association of Immunization Managers Executive Director, offered this excuse:

There may have been an expectation from Operation Warp Speed or others that we’d give everyone the vaccine overnight.…It was a logistics equation for them. If you’ve been in vaccines for a long time, you know that’s the easy part. Getting it into actual arms is the hard part.

Indeed. And yet, knowing these folks had the hard part—getting the syringes needed, getting folks trained to give the shots in order to fill staffing shortfalls that these folks had to have known would exist—they chose to do nothing. Because they chose to not believe the ability of American business and a Trump administration to work together to deliver vaccines—multiple vaccines—within the promised time frame.

And another typical excuse:

State and local jurisdictions have been asking the federal government for more funding to support vaccine distribution than the $340 million disbursed so far.

Never mind that the State and local distributions already have plenty of money—it’s just currently misallocated.

The list of State failures goes on, yet they’re all laid off to the Federal government—in particular the Trump administration—without any regard for the federal republic nature of our governance structure.  All the Feds can do, and the Trump administration down through the CDC did every bit of it, is jawbone the States on domestic matters. The CDC issued guidelines regarding the vaccines—it cannot issue rules—yet the States in many cases chose to do something entirely different.  The Federal government cannot dictate to the States’ their internal policies, particularly including how they prepare for reception of and deliver vaccination shots to their individual citizens.

2.8 million vaccinations injected out of 12 million doses delivered is unacceptable—and the States, Republican and Progressive-Democrat alike have no one to blame but their own disbelieving and inactive selves.

It would have been a no-lose situation, too. Say the States had scrambled to be ready to handle the promised 20 million doses and the vaccines would not have been produced and deliverable until the end of 2021 as so many so-called experts insisted was the earliest possible time frame. The States would have been ready in time to receive and inject, instead of being the failures they are presently.

Another Reason

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…to toss the elites and reassert the sovereignty of We the People.

In a Christmas Eve interview with the New York Times, [Dr Anthony, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] Fauci acknowledged he had offered a lower estimate of the level of herd immunity necessary to stop the COVID-19 pandemic because he thought Americans would be discouraged by hearing his true thoughts on the issue.

And

“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75%,” he told reporter Donald McNeil. “Then, when newer surveys said 60% or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

And this:

At the outset of the pandemic, Fauci…advised against wearing face masks, telling the public that doing so was unnecessary unless an individual was showing symptoms of COVID-19.
…
When pressed in June on why he had initially argued against masks, Fauci said that the public health community was “concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.”

Lying to us “for our own good.”

It’s time to remove these…persons…from office and from other positions of influence.

Apologies

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Daniel Henninger had a thought in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal on the relationship between the Wuhan Virus situation (my term, not his) and apologies.

I have my own thought on the broader matter of apologies themselves.

…difficult this year to tell which is greater—the number of people infected with Covid-19 or the number of politicians issuing apologies….

Other than Operation Warp Speed’s chief, General Gustave Perna, I’ve heard almost no politician apologize for anything. In truth, though, the apology was killed long ago.

What is issued in lieu of apology, and not only by politicians, has long been an expression of “regret” for “any offense that might have occurred.” Never mind that offense plainly was taken, or there’d have been no objection. Doubting that is dishonest.

On top of that, the utterer piously announces his regret—for an offense that he’s not convinced even occurred—but he has not a syllable of actual apology for his misbehavior that led to the offense. Masquerading his utterance as an apology is a very large lie.

Aside from that, “accepting responsibility,” “owning the matter,” and similar self-serving claims are cynically meaningless phrases, uttered only to distract from the fact that the speaker does nothing to change his behavior or otherwise to correct his error.