Friday, March 29, 2024
Miles from the Mainstream
D. R. ZUKERMAN, proprietor

LPR's Random Musings

September 10, 2021 --

LPR Is Not Surprised …

...by Rep. Jim Banks' remarks, late August, that the Democrats are authoritarians who are not playing games, but intend to crush the Republicans.    LPR has, for the past five years, tried to get attention paid a David Plouffe tweet calling for the total destruction of Donald Trump and "his kind."   The Plouffe quote is in this New York Times article by Amy Chozick, August 3, 2016:

CLICK HERE TO VIEW LINK

LPR, however, cannot understand why Republicans have not called attention to this indication that the Democrats have indeed become a totalitarian-mind political party.   A political party looking to destroy the opposition hardly believes in a two-party system, hardly tolerates dissent, hardly is committed to liberty. Republicans, when will you stand together and tall to MAGA?

 

What is the Biden administration thinking?

Attorney General Merrick Garland, June 15, gave a talk on the Biden policy on domestic terrorism.  The attorney general failed to identify domestic terrorist groups comparable to ISIS; indeed he equated the unnamed domestic terrorist groups to ISIS and al-Qaeda.  LPR has difficulty with the instances mentioned by the attorney general as acts of terrorism, because these instances,
including the murder of 11 Jews  as a Pittsburgh synagogue, three years ago, were, as LPR sees them, the acts of psychopaths, not terrorist organizations.  The attorney general did say that we will maintain a "relentless...focus"  on foreign terrorist organizations, an assertion that deserves a question for Mr. Garland, after the Kabul airport atrocity that took the lives of 12 Maines and one Navy medic, along with 169 Afghans trying to flee Taliban rule.

 

What is with the  Democrats?

First an online report, August 31, that Speaker Pelosi would not permit a reading in the House of the names of the 11 Marines, one Navy corpsman and one Army sergeant killed by an ISIS-K suicide bomber at Kabul airport, and, the same day, Biden claiming  that the Afghanistan evacuation was an "extraordinary success."  The Wall Street Journal, in its lead September 1, indicted that Biden's character and judgment has become questionable -- and commented that the remaining time of his presidency will be a "long three-and-a-half years."   The editorial went on to comment that the "[m]ost dishonest -- and dangerous" assertion in Biden's August 31 claim of victory in Afghanistan was saying "that 'the war in Afghanistan is now over.' No one in the jihadist movement believes that.'"

 

See The New York Times, April 14, 2021

The banner headline for that edition reads: "BIDEN SETS END DATE FOR NATION'S LONGEST WAR."  (Wasn't it an undeclared war -- and second longest , after Korea which, technically has not ended.)

The lead story reported  that Biden "overrul[ed] warnings from his military advisers that the departure could prompt a resurgence of the same terrorist threats that send hundreds of thousands of troops into combat over the last 20 years."  The report went on to say, "the president is doing things his way."   As Robert Gates has famously indicated, Biden's way, more likely than not, is the wrong way.   On an inside page of the April 14, 2021 edition of The News York Times, David E. Sanger noted, "after less than three months as president, Mr. Biden came to the determination that only. full withdrawal -- with no link to political conditions on the ground -- would wrench America's attention away from the conflict of the past two decades in favor of the very different kinds he expects in the next two."  This is hardly fulsome praise for Biden.

 

Capitol police officers v. Donald Trump…

The following is copied and pasted from the Just the News website, August 27, about a lawsuit against Donald Trump.

The complaint, in which five of the  [seven] officers suing are black, accuses Trump and others of having racist and white supremacist motives behind claiming there was election fraud, specifically in areas with high black populations, such as Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.

"They relied on white supremacist groups and sympathizers to organize and hold rallies and to help plan and carry out the Capitol Attack," the lawsuit reads. "Participants in the Attack directed racial epithets at Black officers protecting the Capitol. And after breaching the Capitol, the attackers paraded the Confederate flag and other symbols of white supremacy through the Capitol's halls."

"As this lawsuit makes clear, the Jan. 6 insurrection was not just an attack on individuals, but an attack on democracy itself," said Damon Hewitt, president of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represents the Capitol Police officers. "It was a blatant attempt to stifle the votes and voices of millions of Americans, particularly Black voters."

Mr. Hewitt should be reminded that the FBI, according to reports, does not regard the events at the Capitol, January 6, 2021 as an
"insurrection."   The complaint, from the Just the News excerpt, seems to reflect just ltypical leftist  anti-Trump views and is likely not to survive a motion to dismiss -- unless, of course, the judge is anti-Trump.

 

Two simple questions for the president…

If the Taliban is not considered a ruthless gang who will be out for bloodthirsty revenge after August 31, why are so many Afghans trying to flee their rule?

If the Taliban is considered a ruthless gang out for bloodthirst revenge and is expected to oppress the people, snuffing out the spirit of freedom, why did you fail to resist their demand to evacuate by August 31, 2021?

 

The double Military standard …

The military announced it will not stand for disrespect of Biden over his handling of the Afghanistan "nakba."    But with President Trump, disrespect went as high as Gen, Milley, appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, named to the post by Mr. Trump.

(Had President Trump rightly dismissed Milley over his intemperate marks about the president's walk to see the damage done by leftists to St. John's Church, June 1, 2020, Pelosi likely would have had an article of impeachment drafted on the spot.)

Does Mr. Biden Cater to Media's Big Three?

Breitbart reported, August 26,  that Voice of America journalists are trapped in Afghanistan.

Compare this comment from President Biden, during his August 20 White House remarks on the evacuation:

"In fact, working in close coordination with the management of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, we have successfully evacuated all 204 of their employees in Afghanistan on U.S. military aircraft earlier this week."

Sounds as if the president makes CERTAIN to take care of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

 

Peggy Noonan Revises Her Thinking on President Biden

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, in her September 4-5 column did not go as far as David Horowitz and Daniel Greenfield in their American Greatness excoriation of the president, "Biden Surrenders to the Taliban, the GOP Must Not Surrender to Biden," calling for his impeachment and saying his Afghanistan evacuation was the most humiliating defeat in American history.  (They also called for the removal of the current joint chiefs of staff.).  Ms. Noonan did, however, call the evacuation a "fiasco," and wrote that nothing about it "suggested kindliness or interest in the feelings of others."  She went on to cite a friend of Biden's who had told her "Mr. Biden's weakness is that he always thinks he's the smartest guy in the room."  Of course, LPR has no doubt that had it been President Trump who quit Afghanistan in a rush, leaving Americans unaccounted for and the Afghan people prey, again, to the Taliban, Noonan would have called for Trump's impeachment, said he presided over the worst humiliation in American history and called for the removal of his joint chiefs of staff.

Here is the link to the column, "The Afghan Fiasco Will Stick to Biden."  

CLICK HERE TO VIEW LINK

 

This is what the Democrats look like…

The New York Times, September 6, reported on the situation in Ortega's Nicaragua.  It is a place, according to the Times, where the press is not free; where dissent if forbidden; where middle-of-the-night arrests are conducted on arbitrary charges and secret trials are held without right of defense counsel.  What the Times gave readers was a glimpse of  a fascist dictatorship ruled brutally by Ortega.  Thing is, Ortega has long enjoyed the support of Democrats in Congress, going back to the Reagan administration when they helped bring this fascist to power and prevented President Reagan from backing liberty in Nicaragua.  Add to this  the Democrats' love affair with  communist Cuba and  we see that they are the party of suppression, repression and oppression, presently led by the serial liar in the White House.   Note how Biden's poll numbers are sinking below President Trump's numbers, and President Trump's numbers were artificially lowered by the mean-spirited anti-freedom media. Is military Milley organizing an ouster of Biden so Kamala becomes a president he can dominate?

 

An Explanation Why Biden Is Not a Leader…

(From The Western Journal, August 27)

Fox News’ Jesse Watters attacked Biden for shifting the Afghanistan blame on others during a Thursday episode of “Watters World,” saying, “President Biden says the buck stops with him, but the guy just can’t stop blaming others for the mistakes.”

Watters pointed to Biden’s ABC News interview with former Clinton administration communications director George Stephanopoulos during which Biden bolstered his defenses.

“There was no consensus. You go back in look at the intelligence reports, they said it was more likely to be sometime by the end of the year,” Biden said during the interview, according to Fox News.

LPR's comment:   A leader either acts without regard to "consensus," or creates "consensus."   A president who follows "consensus" is, literally, a mere follower.

 

The following is taken from Attorney General Garland's June 15 address on domestic terrorism policy. …

"It is also why, even as we augment our efforts against domestic terrorism, we remain relentless in our focus on international terrorism perpetrated by foreign terrorist organizations like al-Qa’ida and ISIS."

Mr. Garland's assertion of the administration's  "relentless...focus" on terror groups like ISIS seems to have lost  some credibility as of the August 26 ISIS atrocity in Kabul, which perhaps is a function of the president's apparent unwillingness to confront the Taliban to demand that it cause no harm to American citizens and not restrain any American from leaving Afghanistan.  (Could the situation in Afghanistan be a mess because this administration is a mess?)

Btw-- In his remarks, as LPR read them, Mr. Garland does not mention specific terror groups in the U.,S.   He does suggest that the January 6 circumstance at the Capitol was domestic terrorism, and also mentioned that unspecified white supremacist groups are the FBI's "top"  domestic terrorism threat.    This is what he said about the FBI's view of the threat from white supremacist groups:

"According to an unclassified summary of the March intelligence assessment, the two most lethal elements of the domestic violence extremist threat are “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, and militia violent extremists.” In the FBI’s view, the top domestic violent extremist threat comes from “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocated for the superiority of the white race. "

LPR would  note that the occasions of urban looting and arson are  never mentioned in a terrorism context, never considered the work of organized violent extremists.