History will not look kindly on Biden's treatment of Israel

 The president's pause in shipment of a new round of munitions for Israel betrays one of the United States's closest allies and ups the imperiling of the West to a new level.

As is often the case when someone is trying to morally justify an untenable position, in his interview with CNN's Erin Burnett, he pretty much acknowledged -whether he meant to or not - that he knows the bombs in question will achieve the very aim Israel is pursuing:

“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett in an exclusive interview on “Erin Burnett OutFront,” referring to 2,000-pound bombs that Biden paused shipments of last week.

“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,” Biden said.

The president’s announcement that he was prepared to condition American weaponry on Israel’s actions amounts to a turning point in the seven-month conflict between Israel and Hamas. And his acknowledgement that American bombs had been used to kill civilians in Gaza was a stark recognition of the United States’ role in the war.

Biden - and the peaceniks and antinomians with a morbid fascination with jihad with whom he's trying to curry favor - act like the IDF gives no attention to the effectiveness of its strikes, that it gives no thought to collateral damage.

Actually, the held-up munitions are the most advance way to achieve the aim with minimal impact on civilian life:

Last week, the administration’s line was that it needed to see a plausible evacuation plan from Rafah—a statement indicating that it still supported the overall aim of eliminating Hamas and that the problem going forward was primarily logistical. So that might simply have been a lie. It’s no secret Biden doesn’t want Israel to conduct a full-scale war operation in Rafah, but the administration made it sound as though that was entirely on humanitarian grounds.

But if his primary aim is to limit civilian casualties, his methods of doing so are insane. The munitions he is holding back would in part allow Israel to hit sites and areas in Rafah with great precision. That is how you limit casualties. Which leads me to believe that Joe Biden is literally trying to freeze the conflict in place permanently—for his own reasons. Those reasons are bad, and stupid, and feckless, and self-defeating. For Israel cannot stop the war. It can’t. If it does, Hamas wins—at which point Israel will begin a new period of mortal peril perhaps more threatening to its future than any period in its past. The Israeli public will not stand for it. Because of what Biden is doing, the war will be bloodier and more costly for both sides, and will take much longer. How on earth will that help him?

Think about what kind of cackling and rubbing together of hands is going on in the inner governmental chambers of Iran, Russia, China and North Korea. The debacle at the Kabul airport in August 2021gave our foes a strong signal that Biden had no consistent foreign policy vision. This seals the deal.

And the shipment of bombs and ammunition had already been approved by Congress. How is this different from Trump holding up aid to Ukraine in an attempt to motivate Zelensky to dig up dirt on Biden (a move the got him impeached)?

A fine state of affairs. A US president mishandles a crucial moment when a ringing victory for the West is at hand.

This is why, since 2016, I have not bought the binary-choice argument.

The Very Stable Genius, who we now know likes to be spanked by his casual sex partners, is an obvious thumbs-down.

But this current guy? He's forever stained himself with a shame that will impact us all.

 

Easter is completely meaningless at the Biden White House

 The administration has blasted away at America's foundation with a double whammy.

Egg designers are to stay away from the actual reason why Easter is celebrated:

Children of the National Guard are prohibited from submitting religious Easter egg designs for the 2024 “Celebrating National Guard Families” art event at the White House. 

The art contest is part of the White House’s Easter traditions, which include the annual Easter Egg Roll.

The flyer for the contest states that an Easter egg design submission “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.” 

And get this:

Children are asked to design eggs with images based on their own lives.

Yes, indeed, nothing more important than what these toddlers have so far experienced in their not-much-more-than-blank-slate lives. Maybe they get extra points for designs that express their feelings about those lives. Never mind the risen Lord and the life available when we take up our cross and follow Him.

And since March 31 is the day when, since 2009, the federal government has made people with delusions about what sex they are feel comfortable in those delusions, the fact that it coincides with Easter this year ain't gonna stop this president from proceeding with proceedings:

President Biden this week declared Transgender Day of Visibility for March 31 — which this year is on Easter Sunday.

“I, Joseph R. Biden Jr., president of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility,” the Friday pronouncement read. 

“I call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination against all transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary people.”

 Devout Catholic, my ass.

This is obviously not going to be the only noting of this trampling on sound-doctrine faith out there. But much of the consternation is going to come from the drool-besotted yay-hoos who intend to vote for the candidate who hawks pieces of his suit, calendars depicting himself in various macho fantasy settings, golden athletic shoes and sixty-dollar Bibles, who tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the last election, who, in 1997, after being introduced to her by Ghislane Maxwell, spent several days with a 20-year-old model at Mar-a-Lago and then put her up in one of his New York apartments, and who, when asked in 2016 what Easter meant to him, couldn't come up with anything meatier than that the holiday means "family and get-together" in a "beautiful church."

I wanted documentation to exist that actual conservatives are disgusted with the Biden administration's stripping of Easter of all significance.

I realize it's a position that requires some fleshing out, but I still intend to stay home in November. 

 

 

Imposing tyranny on two policy fronts: the family and energy

 LITD readers are familiar with my explanation regarding why, while I can't vote for a Republican Party that has wholly given itself over to the MAGA cult, I also cannot vote for any candidate of the Democratic Party. It's the party of climate alarmism, militant identity politics, and wealth redistribution.

The third characteristic is the means by which it enacts policies motivated by the first two.

Today's Exhibit A is the Biden administration's plan to subsidize day care:

It’s an election year, and so the Biden administration is going all-in on an ill-considered, poorly targeted campaign of subsidizing child care.

Biden’s child care plan is expensive social engineering that would create shortages and reward special interests while providing no help to millions of parents. While we grant it will get glowing press and might sound good in a stump speech, there are no redeeming traits to this plan. None. It is wretched from top to bottom.

“Make no mistake,” Vice President Kamala Harris posted last week. “President Joe Biden and I intend to cap child care costs at $10 a day for the average family and make preschool free for all four-year-olds.”

It’s imprudent for the government to spend tens of billions of dollars a year on child care at a time of record deficits and high inflation. Any pro-family spending or tax breaks Congress sees fit to provide should go to slight expansions of the child tax credit (indexing it for inflation, at the very least).

Giving parents money or letting them keep more of their own is obviously superior family policy because it gives parents a choice. Some will spend their tax savings on day care. Others will use the cash cushion as a way to work less and thus spend more time with children. Still others will use the money to build a granny flat or hire a nanny.

But the Biden administration seems dominated by ideologues who think there is only one right choice for a couple: two full-time jobs and institutional day care.

Most parents, however, do not want this. American Compass found in a 2021 poll that 53% of married mothers prefer to have one stay-at-home parent at least until the youngest child is in kindergarten.

This truth will be lost on the governing and media elites. “Whereas lower-, working-, and middle-class adults are most likely to choose a full-time worker and a stay-at-home parent as their ideal,” American Compass reported, “upper-class adults prefer both parents to work full-time and to rely on paid childcare.”

In this way, Biden’s day care subsidies are like his student loan bailouts: Wealth transfers to his highly educated, high-income base in high-cost states.

What’s more, the $10-dollars-a-day child care plan simply will not work. Ten dollars a day is the same tagline used by the liberal government of Canada, where the day care industry is imploding.

Subsidizing demand is not the way to make a thing more available and affordable. If you simply subsidize demand for a thing, it gets more and more expensive: See American healthcare and higher education.

Then there is the ever-more aggressive government interference in the agreements which millions of free individuals, some of whom produce cars and some of whom buy them, enter into as to what kinds of vehicles are produced and consumed, all in the name of forcing play-like energy forms down our throats:

The Biden administration is expected this week to finalize highly anticipated regulations targeting gas-powered vehicle tailpipe emissions, considered the tip of the spear in its efforts to electrify the transportation sector.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is slated to issue the final rulemaking — which officials have boasted will incentivize greater adoption of electric vehicles (EV), but which opponents have criticized as a de facto mandate — as soon as Wednesday, industry sources told Fox News Digital. The regulations, a key part of President Biden's climate agenda, would ultimately force automakers to more rapidly expand electric options in their fleets beginning in a matter of years.

They are targeting specific percentages:

Overall, under the proposal, which EPA unveiled in April 2023 and will go into effect in 2027, the White House projected that 67% of new sedan, crossover, SUV and light truck purchases would be electric by 2032. In addition, up to 50% of bus and garbage truck, 35% of short-haul freight tractor and 25% of long-haul freight tractor purchases could also be electric by then.

The White House said the proposal, which represents the most aggressive proposal of its kind ever proposed, would "accelerate the clean vehicle transition" and reduce oil imports by 20 billion barrels. Biden and climate activists have taken aim at the transportation sector over its high emissions profile — it alone produces roughly 29% of America's greenhouse gas emissions, federal data shows.

So, no, I can't subscribe to the idea that, because I understand what a disaster a Trump victory would be,  I'm obligated to vote for the alternative.

I'm staying home in November. I don't want the eternal record book to show I had anything to do with either form of American ruination. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biden, Pope Francis, and the rules-based international order

 The two hottest of the world's hot spots had the moral clarity with which they're fraught muddied by, respectively, the leader of the world's pre-eminent superpower and the worldwide leader of the Catholic Church.

After Biden announced, in his State of the Union address, the pier the US military will construct to get more aid into Gaza (which one would hope will work out better than the air drop, two parachutes of which didn't open, killing several Gazan on the ground, but, based on experience, is likely to be pilfered by Hamas, and may put US troops in harm's way), he was caught on a hot mic telling Colorado Senator Michael Bennet that he was going to tell Netanyahu "You and I are going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting."

Netanyahu has responded:

When asked on Sunday whether Israeli forces would move into Rafah, Netanyahu replied: "We'll go there. We're not going to leave them. You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That October 7 doesn't happen again. Never happens again." The PM was referring to the murderous Hamas raid that killed more than 1,160 people in Israel and triggered the war. 

Without naming them, Netanyahu claimed he had the tacit support of several Arab leaders for driving ahead with the onslaught against Hamas.

“They understand that, and even agree with it quietly,” he said in an interview with Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company. “They understand Hamas is part of the Iranian terror axis.”

And he again reiterates Israel's position on an idea whose time has definitely not arrived:

Israel's prime minister also doubled down on his rejection of the possibility of a Palestinian state — a topic that pits Israel against most of the rest of the world.

“The positions that I espouse are supported by the overwhelming majority of Israelis who say to you after October 7: 'We don't want to see a Palestinian state,'” he said. 

Netanyahu also directly addressed criticism from Biden, who has said the Israeli leader is “hurting Israel more than helping Israel.” 

Netanyahu hit back, saying while he didn’t know “exactly what the president meant,” if Biden was saying he was contravening the wishes or interests of Israel, he was “wrong on both counts.”

“[The Israeli people] also support my position that says that we should resoundingly reject the attempt to ram down our throats a Palestinian state. That is something that they agree on,” Netanyahu said.

When asked about the European view that there cannot be peace without a two-state solution, Netanyahu replied: "Yeah, they would say it. But they don't understand that the reason we don't have peace is not because the Palestinians don't have a state. It's because the Jews have a state. And in fact, the Palestinians have not brought themselves to recognize and accept the Jewish state."

Then there is the response of Ukraine and its allies to Pope Francis's blurting, which echoes both the Kissingerian Realpolitik camp as well as unhinged yay-hoos like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene - namely, that Ukraine needs to give up the idea of having its post-1991 borders restored: 

Ukrainian and allied officials Sunday criticized Pope Francis for saying that Kyiv should have the “courage” to negotiate an end to the war with Russia, a statement many interpreted as a call for Ukraine to surrender. 

The foreign ministers of Ukraine and Poland, a vocal ally of Kyiv, condemned the pope’s remarks. And a leader of one of Ukraine’s Christian churches on Sunday said that only the country’s determined resistance to Moscow’s full-scale invasion, launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 24, 2022, had prevented a mass slaughter of civilians.

In an interview recorded last month with Swiss broadcaster RSI and partially released on Saturday, Francis used the phrase “the courage of the white flag” as he argued that Ukraine, facing a possible defeat, should be open to peace talks brokered by international powers.

“Our flag is blue and yellow. We live, die and win under it. We will not raise other flags,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba posted on Sunday on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski tweeted: “How about, for balance, encouraging Putin to have the courage to withdraw his army from Ukraine? Peace would immediately ensue without the need for negotiations.”

In his tweet, Kuleba urged the Holy See to “not repeat historical mistakes” as he alleged that the Vatican didn’t do enough to resist Nazi Germany. Yet he also invited Francis to Ukraine, saying the pope’s visit would show support for the “more than a million Ukrainian (Roman) Catholics, more than 5 million Greek Catholics, all Christians and all Ukrainians.” 

The head of Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church, Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, said Sunday that surrender isn’t on the minds of Ukrainians.

“Ukraine is exhausted, but it stands and will endure. Believe me, it never crosses anyone’s mind to surrender. Even where there is fighting today: listen to our people in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, Kharkiv, Sumy,” Shevchuk said while meeting with Ukrainians in New York City. He mentioned the regions that have been under heavy Russian artillery and drone attacks.

These matters look a little different to the nations whose sovereignty is threatened than it does to those who can adopt a -just-stop-all-the-icky-killing stance from the distance of well-defended capitols.

 

 

 

 

A night on which everything that makes post-America "post" was on display

 I didn't watch the SOTU speech, but I've read a pretty comprehensive array of takes. It appears to have been "fiery" (a word that has shown up in several headlines), with some left-of-center partisans saying it dispels any notions that Biden is senile. 

From the LITD perspective (again, on what I've gleaned of the content by reading about it), it seems to have been a mixed bag.

He is - and perhaps the stopped-clock-being-right-twice-a-day framing has some applicability here - spot on about the stakes in Ukraine. In fact, his choosing the opportunity afforded by that topic to point out the quashing of a painstakingly hammered out bipartisan bill that would have provided Ukraine aid and Israel aid and Taiwan aid and border resources, with cameras panning to Senator Lankford - he whose noble efforts in crafting it fell short - was a moment of moral clarity.

But his picking on Israel and this business about a port for aid to get into Gaza - aid that will be surely be pilfered by the enemy Israel must obliterate - was definitely not such a moment.

He unsurprisingly displayed the ignorance of basic economics common to pretty much everyone left of center by saying corporations and "the rich" needs be taxed more.

And of course, in driving home his theme of freedom, he had to include this "right" he sees for people to exterminate fetal Americans. 

I have no problem with his going after Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. The Very Stable Genius and the party he now completely dominates are at least as spiritually rotten as the Democrats, so it stand to reason that Biden is going to point out that rottenness.

The general consensus, even among Republicans, is that Katie Britt's Republican response was just plain goofy. As observers are saying, it's ripe for a parody skit on Saturday Night Live.

Then there was the array of costumes, buttons and all such regalia that yay-hoos of various stripes decided to come attired in. Hecklers. Walkers-out. Marjorie Taylor-Greene. 

And note must be taken of the re-routing of the motorcade from a straight shot up Pennsylvania Avenue because pro-jihad protestors felt self-righteous preening was a higher priority than public order.

A little something for everybody on a March Thursday night as we stare over the precipice into the abyss where the echoes of Western civilization's architects fade into silence.

The stench of rot at the DoJ and FBI must be unflinchingly faced

 An editorial at National Review lays out in comprehensible fashion the sum total of what daily news reports have been dribbling out with lots of arcane details but little in the way of a coherent narrative. I'll be excerpting generously from it here. 

The introductory paragraphs spell out the three conclusions we must unavoidably draw from what we know so far:

The compelling congressional testimony of two IRS whistleblower agents has established three things.

First, the investigation into Biden corruption — millions of dollars pouring into the family coffers from apparatchiks of corrupt and anti-American regimes seeking to buy Joe Biden’s political influence — is real and has been thwarted by the Biden Justice Department. Second, the president’s son Hunter Biden received preferential treatment, and, next week, a federal judge should reject the sweetheart plea deal he was given by the Justice Department. Third, Attorney General Merrick Garland owes the country an explanation for why the Biden investigation has been sabotaged from within, even as he maintains publicly that it was conducted with independence and integrity.

The whistleblowers' frustration was palpable to the House committee they've been working with:

The two whistleblowers — supervisory agent Gary Shapley and the Biden investigation’s main case agent, Joseph Ziegler — began cooperating with the House Ways and Means Committee several weeks back. While Shapley went public in June, Ziegler was not publicly identified until Wednesday’s hearing. Their revelations have been jaw-dropping.

The agents recounted being blocked at every turn by Justice Department prosecutors as they tried to go about the routine steps investigators would take in any case — or, at least, any case not involving politically connected suspects. The investigation was slow-walked by prosecutors from the office of Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss, to whom the case was assigned in 2018.

And let's head off at the pass any notion that Weiss being a Trump appointee bears any weight:

Garland and congressional Democrats never tire of branding Weiss a Trump-appointee — it’s Garland’s rationalization for not appointing a special counsel. Conveniently omitted from this story is the fact that Weiss could not have been confirmed absent the support of Delaware’s two Democratic senators, Biden allies Tom Carper and Chris Coons. More to the point, Weiss reports to Garland and, because the Hunter Biden matter is a tax case, DOJ rules dictate that any tax charges must be approved by the Tax Division at Main Justice — run by Biden appointees. Most obviously, Weiss’s appointment by Trump does nothing to eradicate the conflict of interest inherent in the Biden Justice Department’s investigation of the president’s son over conduct in which the president himself is implicated.

Weiss and his underlings used the pendency of the 2020 presidential campaign as an excuse to instruct the IRS and FBI agents on the case not to take measures that might call attention to the investigation and thus influence the election. Note that, simultaneously, according to tech executives and Republican senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, FBI agents were signaling that the pre-election emergence of derogatory information about the Bidens — e.g., the Hunter laptop and the influx of money from foreign sources — was likely the result of a Russian intelligence operation.

After Biden was elected, Shapley and Ziegler recalled being undermined in attempting to uncover evidence. The day before they planned to conduct interviews of Hunter Biden and other investigative subjects, the FBI alerted the Secret Service, which tipped off the Biden transition team. As a result, lawyers for Hunter and most other subjects refused to speak to the IRS. In connection with interviews that were later planned, the lead prosecutor from Weiss’s office, Lesley Wolf, forbade them from pursuing investigative leads that could potentially connect the president himself to the Biden family business — instructing them not to ask questions about Hunter’s “dad,” or about “the big guy” (as we now know several investigative subjects referred to the now-president).

Wolf told the agents that issuing a warrant based on the laptop evidence would be bad optics, doncha know:

In 2019, the FBI obtained Hunter’s laptop, teeming with data about the Bidens’ lucrative foreign transactions and Joe Biden’s potential connections to them; yet Weiss’s office denied the IRS agents access to this evidence. In early September 2020, Wolf agreed with the agents that there was more than enough probable cause to support a warrant to search a guest house at the Bidens’ Wilmington residence where Hunter was living; still, she is said to have declined to seek the warrant because “the optics” would be bad. After the election, the agents learned that Hunter had moved documents from his business office in Washington, D.C., to a commercial storage unit in northern Virginia. They convinced Weiss, over Wolf’s objection, to allow them to seek a search warrant if Hunter did not access the unit for 30 days. But, while the agents were preparing the warrant, Wolf precluded them by alerting Hunter’s defense lawyers about the existence of the storage unit, again putting the evidence out of the investigators’ reach.

Shapley and Ziegler are among the IRS’s most experienced and accomplished agents. Despite the strictures placed on them, they built a compelling tax case against Hunter Biden — even the limited evidence, according to Ziegler, showed that Hunter had evaded roughly $2.2 million in taxes on $8.3 million in foreign income between 2014 and 2019. The agents and the line lawyers in DOJ’s Tax Division and Weiss’s office all agreed that a felony prosecution was called for.

There was much evading about where charges could be filed, based on where the tax-evading occurred. Conveniently, it outlasted the statute of limitiations. 

And the money being hidden from the IRS came from bribes:

The 2014 and 2015 tax years included Hunter’s lavish, undeclared income from his sinecure at the allegedly corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. This period is crucial to the potential corruption scheme. According to information provided to the FBI by an informant with a reliable track record (and released yesterday by Senator Chuck Grassley), after speaking with then–Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky placed Hunter on the company’s board and paid him over $80,000 per month (a rate that, reportedly, was roughly halved once Joe Biden was no longer vice president). The informant added that Zlochevsky told him he’d paid then–Vice President Biden and his son a combined $10 million bribe to use Biden’s influence on Burisma’s behalf, and had made the payments through a byzantine array of companies and accounts that he bragged would take investigators a decade to trace to Joe Biden. This alleged scheme strongly resembles the pattern uncovered by House investigators showing foreign actors paying Biden family members (including grandchildren) millions of dollars through labyrinthine channels that included some 20 obscure business entities, most of which Hunter set up while Joe was vice president.

And consider the Attorney General's role in all this. I'd say this country dodged a bullet when Mitch McConnell took a pass on the Senate advising and consenting on this guy when Obama nominated him for the Supreme Court:

Garland’s story is a crock. He asserts that Weiss would have been given any necessary authority — he only needed to ask. But the U.S. attorneys for Washington and California work for Garland; they couldn’t have blocked Weiss without the attorney general’s support. And it’s not a district U.S. attorney’s job to ask the attorney general for special-counsel authority — which would be tantamount to asking to be fired since, by regulation, a special counsel must be a lawyer “from outside the United States Government.” Rather, it is the attorney general’s duty to appoint a special counsel if there is a conflict of interest that prevents the Justice Department from investigating in the normal course.

And funny business seems to follow Hunter Biden wherever he goes, even though he's supposed to be well along in his recovery and immersed in his painting activities. I still think it's damn odd that the Secret Service couldn't determine where the White House cocaine came from. 

And what kind of guy safeguarding his precarious recovery hires a lawyer like this?

Hunter Biden visited his 'sugar brother' Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris – who was photographed appearing to smoke from a bong.

The First Son took a trip from his Malibu pad to the Pacific Palisades on Thursday to visit his attorney, after agreeing to plead guilty to federal tax crimes last month.

While Hunter was at the house, Morris was snapped on a balcony in plain view of the public street appearing to huff from a white bong, in photos exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com.

And who is the babe in the yellow floral dress Hunter is photographed hugging as he arrives?

The 60-year-old Hollywood attorney is known for his hard-driving tactics and high-profile cases, but appeared relaxed on the sunny balcony in a purple short-sleeved shirt.

Hunter arrived in the afternoon in a black SUV, escorted by Secret Service bodyguards and dressed in a blue shirt, jeans and aviator sunglasses favored by both him and his father. He was greeted at the Los Angeles home by a woman in a yellow floral dress.

Now, as is always necessary in 2023 post-America, LITD must addresses any questions of a whataboutism. 

The Very Stable Genius has already been indicted twice and more indictments are coming, and they're all entirely justified. 

Now, does anybody still want to get behind the look-it's-going-to-be-one-or-the-other-of-them argument at this late date?

True, the law-enforcement apparatus has done itself no favors, given the obvious corruption outlined above. But Donald Trump's unfitness for office is now unavoidably clear. Even those who began to drool uncontrollably and quake with adulation when he descended the escalator in 2015 have not even the flimsiest of reasons why we should usher this charlatan back in.

So what's to be done?

The first step is to ask how we as a country became so spiritually sick as to give ourselves this choice.

This will be the subject of a Precipice post I intend to write today. 

 

 

 

 

Joe Biden as the embodiment of the dismantling of family

 In just my short initial perusal of news stories so far this morning, I've come across two that verily scream to be juxtaposed.

The First

I really hesitate to delve into the business of pointing out hypocrisy. As I've said before, hypocrisy is often not a very good gauge of a principle's immutability. Some hypocrites are quite articulate. They can talk a good game about something widely recognized as an eternal verity, and utterly disregard it in their personal conduct. Examples abound. See me raising my hand? 

But occasionally a figure takes a prominent place on our national stage - say, assumes the presidency - and starts making some issue a cultural and political cornerstone of his policy formation. But what he's doing in his personal life is so incongruous with his utterances that one has to conclude he's the wrong person to be weighing in on the subject at all.

 Example A:

Shortly after the Supreme Court declared affirmative action college admission policies unconstitutional, President Joe Biden said his administration would direct the Department of Education to scrutinize how "practices like legacy admissions … expand privilege instead of opportunity."

The department could start by examining how politically connected families like the Bidens get their children into Ivy League schools.

In 2018, Hunter Biden tapped his father and a number of Biden family connections to help get his daughter into the University of Pennsylvania. Text messages and emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, show how Joe and Hunter Biden worked behind the scenes to get a subpar family member into one of the most selective schools in the country.

Maisy Biden's college admissions process could raise a number of uncomfortable questions for the president. The saga highlights exactly the kind of "legacy admissions" Biden has slammed. The story also highlights the Biden family's occasionally shady dealings with the University of Pennsylvania just as congressional Republicans are probing alleged ethical misconduct by both Joe and Hunter Biden.

Maisy Biden was never much of a student. But she had her sights set on the University of Pennsylvania, whose 5.9 percent acceptance rate made it one of the most exclusive schools in the country.

"I applied early decision to Penn today!!" Maisy Biden texted Hunter Biden on October 31.

Just two days later, Maisy asked her father for an update on her application. In the coming months, Hunter and Joe Biden would mount a full-court press on university administrators to get Maisy's application over the finish line. The Bidens took their case directly to the top: University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann.

On December 13, 2018, the elder Biden texted Hunter that he was "going to try to see [University of Pennsylvania] Pres GUTMANN tomorrow." Two days later, Joe Biden told Hunter Biden that he "had a great talk with Guttman [sic]."

"Maisy still in the game for regular acceptance. But must do well in class this period. It's real," Joe Biden wrote on December 15. "We should talk about tutors etc starting tomorrow."

The next day, Hunter Biden told his daughter the good news—she had not been rejected. Hunter Biden said his father received some advice from Gutmann: Maisy needed to get her grades up in her senior year. Hunter also suggested that Maisy could see her chances improve if she expressed interest in playing lacrosse at Penn. Although it's unclear whether the lacrosse tip was from Joe Biden's conversations with the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Hunter was peeved that the counsel came so late.

"I also think it would help if you had lax coach talk to their lax coach," Hunter wrote. "Bottom line is that Guttman [sic] made clear that in order for her to explain the 11th grade you had to show improvement in 12th," Hunter wrote. "Which is something I think we would have all liked to know form [sic] the start, but in fairness we were much later in the app process than usual and made it look like we weren't 100% about Penn."

In the same conversation with Hunter, Joe Biden also said Gutmann would call him directly to let him know whether Maisy was accepted.

"If I hear before 1pm on [March 29, 2019] I'll call immediately so you can call Maisy," Joe Biden wrote. "Let me know if there's anything I can do on anything."

The influence campaign worked. Maisy Biden matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2019. President Joe Biden was present in the stands four years later, when Maisy graduated with a bachelor of arts degree.

Biden's infatuation with the Ivy League goes back decades.  "There's a river of power that flows through this country," Biden said in 1988, according to a book by journalist Richard Ben Cramer. "Some people, a few, get to swim in the river all the time. … And that river flows from the Ivy League."

The Biden family had cultivated a close relationship with Gutmann by the time Joe Biden leaned on him to tip the scales for Maisy. Gutmann in 2013 awardedJoe Biden an honorary doctor of laws degree from the university and has called the president "one of our nation's foremost statesmen."

Joe and Hunter Biden held a flurry of meetings with Gutmann in 2016, emails from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop show. In January 2016, the three met at Joe Biden's Delaware beach house, according to the emails.

In April 2016, Joe and Hunter Biden met with Gutmann at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Hunter Biden directed his business partner Eric Schwerin to cancel a preexisting appointment with the prime minister of the Ivory Coast so that he could attend the meeting.

"You are supposed to meet with the Ivory Coast PM at 8:30am at the Sofitel downtown. Cancel?" Schwerin wrote to Hunter Biden two days before the April 15 meeting.

"Yes I guess so—can he reschedule—the Guttman [sic] mtg is a must attend for me per Dad," Hunter Biden responded. "I need to be at NAVOBS at 9AM sharp."

The Second

Well, at least the episode shows that Joe and Hunter are dedicate family men, right?

Not so fast:

White House aides have been told during strategy meetings that the president and first lady Jill Biden have six, not seven, grandchildren, two people familiar with the discussions told the newspaper.

In April, Biden listed six of his grandchildren by name during a "take your child to work day" event at the White House.

"I have six grandchildren, and I’m crazy about them. And I speak to them every single day. Not a joke," he said at the time.

Biden has also put up Christmas stockings at the White House for six of the grandchildren, but has repeatedly left his seventh grandchild out of the annual tradition.

That would be the 4-year-old daughter of Lunden Roberts, with whom Hunter Biden had one of his many liaisons.  

The Biden went to court to keep that seventh grandchild from having Biden as her surname.

The girl is well aware of the situation. Dandy way to be embarking on life, being utterly rejected by her father and his family.

This goes far in explaining why Joe Biden has no problem vocally supporting the "right" to abortion, or why he's so zealously gotten on board with DEI and Pride Month.

He's such an utterly empty suit and dim bulb that he can't imagine we'd see that his attempts to do the devout-Catholic-and-family-man schtick and the let-thirteen-year-old-girls-get-their-breasts-chopped-off cheerleader role simultaneously just don't fit together.

Now, any Democrat reading this who wants to serve up a big dollop of whataboutism at this juncture would do well to scroll the LITD archives and check out the enormity of the verbiage I've spent showing the Very Stable Genius's utter disregard for family - indeed, for the whole notion of warmth, two-way loyalty and sincerity in any connections with other human beings.

But right now, it's time to shine the spotlight on Joe, the current president of post-America.

 

 

 

 

 

Joe Biden is every bit as spiritually grotesque and unfit to lead this nation as Donald Trump

 There will be plenty of time to discuss the Bret Baier interview withe the Very Stable Genius and such, but LITD deems this pretty damn important on a spiritual level:

President Biden on Thursday railed against who he called "hysterical" and "prejudiced" lawmakers enacting laws across the country banning gender transition surgeries for children.

Biden made the comments during an appearance at a joint press conference with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, after being asked by a reporter about the laws being enacted to protect minors, or their parents, from making irreversible changes to their bodies.

"As president, I was proud to end the band on transgender troops in our military, signed the Respect for Marriage Act, strengthen the civil rights protections for all LGBT Americans and advance LGBT human rights around the globe," Biden said. 

This is our president.  What he is upholding is the destruction of not only Western civilization, but the continuation of our species. 

By the way, he's a complete phony. While early on he started casting off the fundamental precepts of his Catholic upbringing, he has never, in his heart of hearts, signed off on this kind of perversion. He's doing this to appeal to the people he wants to vote for him in the final scene of his completely value-vacant career. 

He is a poisonous figure in human history.

I guess it's too much to ask that we have figure vying for high federal office in what's left of what we have, as we were growing up, taken to be the United  States of America, who understands why in the flying fuck Jay and Madison and Washington et al put their asses on the line in the 1770s and 1780s. 

I'll close with something I've felt necessary to state from time to time. Some day I'd like the name of this blog to be rendered obsolete. 

That day is not yet in sight. 

How vulgar and falsehood-laden was Biden's Howard University commencement address?

 Joe Biden has long had a penchant for taking the low road. For instance, think about the 2012 speech in which he, by way of attempting to demonize Paul Ryan's budget proposal and Mitt Romney's support of it,  took a protectionist stance ("We're going to give a tax break to any company that unbolts their factory stuff and brings it back to Danville") that, ironically, later became a core element of Trump's economic "policy" and further gave it a Trumpist flavor by demonizing Wall Street and then letting loose with the big line clearly aimed at those in the audience who happened to be black that has followed him through the years:

Romney wants to let the  — he said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.

 He's still at it.

In his recent commencement address to Howard University graduates, he claimed, with a straight face, that white supremacy was the country's most dangerous domestic terrorist threat. 

Wilfred Reilly, writing at National Review, makes clear that this is a lot of disingenuous divisiveness uttered solely to burnish his identity-politics boon fides:

. . . according to the centrist and well-respected Center for Strategic and International Studies, the average number of annual deaths caused by all American-based terrorists between 2014 and 2021 was 31.

 Even this represents a jump from the period between 1995’s Oklahoma City bombing and 2013, during which the domestic terror toll topped eight only twice. Saying that white supremacists are the biggest “home front” threat means in practice that all of them combined kill perhaps 20 American citizens annually, versus a toll of maybe ten for antifa/black bloc, the “Not F***ing Around Coalition,” and the like. CSIS records 38 white-supremacist and “like-minded” terror attacks in the fairly typical year of 2021, versus 31 for “anarchists” and so-called anti-fascists.

Let’s put this in more context. Obviously, almost all serious terrorist groups are international in range, and very many are specifically Islamic — the stereotype of the Arab terrorist has been around for decades and didn’t come from nowhere. At present, al-Qaeda, the group responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks, has cells worldwide and controls a considerable amount of territory in Mali, Somalia, and Yemen. ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) is based in those troubled nations where once Eden lay. New player Boko Haram is Nigerian and in practice controls much of the northeast of that rising Motherland power.

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Obviously, none of these truly major terror organizations — some of which, in practice, come frighteningly close to being unrecognized nations — qualifies as a U.S. domestic actor. And, speaking frankly, terrorism overall is probably no longer a top-five security threat to the United States — when compared with the rapid rise of China, the opiate and fentanyl epidemic (which killed 110,000 Americans last year), surging crime(murders hit 20,000 annually back in 2020), and so forth.

So, why the national-level focus on the rather niche problem of white supremacy — on 20 deaths per year as vs. 20,000? I sincerely think it’s because what some see as white conservative perfidy can safely be targeted in modern America, with little fear of “cancellation” or political backlash, at least from the Left. Since the civil-rights era of the 1960s, working-poor white Yanks have been very much cemented into liberal mythos as an enemy group: the whey-faced, dirty-handed rioters screaming abuse at sainted MLK. And, unlike other groups that may sometimes be unpopular — “hood” black dudes, “slut-walking” feminists, Muslim Islamists, the over-the-top Pride partiers we’ll all see in a month — they form a population that can generally be attacked without significant social risk. They are the Default Villains of the Prevailing Narrative.

This reality helps explain a phenomenon that is facially baffling to my Asian and West African friends: the constant near-beatification of unsympathetic black criminals killed during violent conflicts with whites or the police. My recent column on this topic discusses this phenomenon in the context of the death of Jordan Neely, a vagrant with 42 previous criminal arrests who was tragically killed during an incident on a New York City subway train. However, the trend dates back more than a decade, encompassing the cases of Jacob Blake, Alton Sterling, Michael Brown, and dozens more.

On the surface, objectively, this pattern is genuinely hard for many citizens to understand. Any death or serious injury is unfortunate, to be sure. But most or all of the deaths just listed seem legally justified. Jacob Blake, for example, had been accused of sexual assault and returned to the home of his purported victim despite her protests (the charge was later dropped). He was non-fatally shot by police after he fought them for several minutes. For his part, Officer Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown, was cleared of any wrongdoing on self-defense grounds by multiple agencies — including the Obama Justice Department.

Even if you disagree with applying the word “justified” on some case-by-case basis, it remains fair to ask why such a hysterical level of mourning invariably erupts around what empirically are unremarkable local crime stories. Frenetic national media coverage of the Blake shooting, recall, helped kick off the Kenosha riots, which made Kyle Rittenhouse a household name. Objectively speaking, why should George Floyd — and not, say, hero cop David Dorn — be buried in a golden casket after four televised funerals? Why are there statues of Floyd in several cities?

The answer is that certain deaths and harms feed into a preexisting narrative: that the United States of 2023 is a white-supremacist country, where the political Left continues to struggle alone against this entrenched evil, and where those killed by the “white power structure” should be presumed to be heroes or at least martyrs. Biden, by searching out some technical category within which he could call white supremacy our greatest national foe, served this self-same narrative during his Howard speech.

The big problem here, bluntly, is that the story line Mr. Biden just promoted on the national stage has been false for decades. Per the proud HBCU faculty of Tuskegee Institute, the last recorded U.S. lynchings took place in 1964. Violent crime involving both blacks and whites is today just 3 percent of all serious “Index” crime . . . and it slants 80–90 percent black on white. What of the police “genocide” we keep hearing about, from presumably serious people? Well, in the most recent year on record, the total number of unarmed black men killed by on-duty U.S. law-enforcement officers was twelve.

The country would be better off if the president spent the rest of his term just being a doddering empty suit and lay off the activist schtick. We'd be less inclined to base policy on lies.