With $40 Billion Secured, Zelenskyy Says Ukraine War Must be Solved Through Diplomacy and Negotiations

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

Heh, it’s almost as if Team Zelenskyy read the tea leaves inside the New York Times editorial opinion recently [SEE HERE] that warned Joe Biden he better get to a negotiated peace deal quickly or the administration will look even worse than it already does.

Two days after the New York Times editorial board says, “it is still not in America’s best interest to plunge into an all-out war with Russia, even if a negotiated peace may require Ukraine to make some hard decisions; and the U.S. aims and strategy in this war have become harder to discern, as the parameters of the mission appear to have changed,” now Zelenskyy is saying he needs to enter diplomatic talks with Russia.

(BBC News) – The war in Ukraine can only be resolved through “diplomacy”, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said. Speaking on national TV, he suggested his country could be victorious against Russia on the battlefield. However, he added that the war could only come to a conclusive halt “at the negotiating table”.

Meanwhile, heavy fighting is taking place in and around Severodonetsk, as Russian forces step up efforts to seize the whole of the Luhansk region.

The end of fighting in the southern port city of Mariupol has freed up Russian troops for redeployment elsewhere and allowed them to intensify their onslaught in the east. Local governor Serhiy Haidai said the Russians were “destroying” Severodonetsk as they gradually surrounded it. (read more)

Don’t forget there was a critical point made two weeks ago by Defense Intel Agency (DIA) Director Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, that not a single media outlet or politician discussed.  During his briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Berrier was asked “can Ukraine win” the conflict against Russia?

Lt. General Berrier replied: “That is a difficult predication to make. I think where the assessment is at, is a prolonged stalemate should no factor change on either side. In other words, the Russians continue to do what they’re doing, and we continue to do what we are doing for the Ukranians.” [link]

The facts on the ground show that Russia has gained almost all of the territory they were trying to achieve.  The Ukrainians are getting crushed, and they’ve lost the ports and cities they were fighting hardest to defend.  “BBC correspondent James Waterhouse said Russia had increased its artillery and air strikes as well as missile attacks – gaining ground mile by mile in Luhansk while the Ukrainians are forced to retreat.”

Comrade Zelenskyy is like the idiot knight in the Monty Python skit who gets his arms and legs chopped off and shouts, “merely a flesh wound.”

In another development, Russia has switched off its gas supply to Finland after it refused Moscow’s demand to pay for fuel in Russian roubles.

Expanding NATO Undermines European and American Security

Rather than contributing to our defense, 

our membership in an expanding NATO will mean 

more conflict for the United States, and for Europe.

by Christopher Roach for American Greatness

Alliances are supposed to deliver peace and protection for their members through the logic of deterrence. The theory is simple: an alliance of nations is stronger than any one of them would be alone. NATO seemed to accomplish this during the Cold War, not least because of the additional deterrent power of America’s nuclear arsenal. 

A proposed NATO expansion to new members—Ukraine, Finland, and Sweden—would also seem to promise peace and security. More members means more people, as well as more military and economic resources. This will combine with the contributions of existing members and save the three countries outside the alliance from their present vulnerability. An expanded NATO will make it prohibitively costly for Russia to “pick off” its neighbors when they have friction. The primary evidence in support of this plan is Russia’s recent invasion of non-NATO Ukraine. 

But Ukraine has also been made vulnerable because of its bid to join NATO. In other words, during periods of transition, there is instability and risk to merely potential members. Expanding NATO to formerly neutral countries in the face of Russia’s demonstrated willingness to go to war to prevent such expansion seems to undermine the claimed contribution of such expansion to European peace. 

In light of these realities, expanding NATO to Finland and Sweden would be a mistake. 

A Chain Is as Strong as Its Weakest Link

First, we have some experience in these matters. Earlier NATO expansions added weak countries and also provoked Russia. Between the three of them, the Baltics (added to NATO in 2004) have only a population of 5.5 million. Collectively, their militaries can only field six or so brigades. These tiny nations have no natural defenses vis a vis their Russian neighbor. 

Owing to their vulnerability, it is obvious why the Baltic states wanted to be in NATO. It is not so obvious how their membership has enhanced the national security interests of more established members like the U.K., France, Germany, or the United States. 

Second, new countries weaken NATO by undermining its unity of purpose. During the Cold War, NATO’s purpose was obvious, and the parties were largely aligned. Since 1991, NATO’s members have taken different approaches on many issues, including relations with the former Soviet Union. 

France has sold military equipment to Russia and continues to do so. Germany has become more dependent on Russian energy supplies to the consternation of the United States and other NATO members. Recently, Turkey and Croatia have signaled opposition to the proposed membership applications of Finland and Sweden. 

Unlike the Baltics, Finland and Sweden are fairly capable militarily, and each has a defense industry of some repute—but their militaries are small. If their membership leads to Hungary or highly militarized Turkey leaving NATO, this would undermine NATO’s stated goals of collective security and result in a net loss to the alliance’s military power. Like any club, it is not good to have potential new members alienate the existing ones.

America’s Disproportionate Burden 

Three, NATO imposes a disproportionate burden on the United States. One purpose of NATO was to employ America’s substantial military power to defend Europe from the threat of the Soviet Union. France and the UK have since joined the nuclear club and can ensure nuclear deterrence to any Russian (or other nation’s) designs against NATO. 

NATO’s other purpose was to keep Germany from remilitarizing. As its first secretary Lord Ismay famously observed, NATO’s purpose was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Germany was divided for the entirety of the Cold War; West Germany’s Bundeswehr, while much larger than its forces today, served alongside (and under the watchful eye of) resident British and American forces. 

Since the end of the Cold War, the goal of demilitarizing Germany has been achieved in spades. Today, it has a remarkably weak military, in part because it has enjoyed a free ride on American defense guarantees. Given its currently pacifistic and liberal political culture, it’s not so clear a Germany assuming its natural role as one of the leading countries of Europe is something the United States should oppose. 

There is a reason, however. One (usually unstated) reason for America’s involvement in NATO, including its continued presence after the Cold War, has been to keep Europe dependent on America for its security. Military dependence on the United States encourages Europeans to be more compliant with other American foreign policy goals. This is the reason why the United States has for many decades only responded with pro forma protests when NATO members have not met their spending obligations. Such weakness serves the goal of U.S. dominance. Of course, this policy is completely at odds with the extravagant rhetoric about NATO’s contributions to American security.

In spite of these claims, such contributions to the United States since the end of the Cold War have been very modest. NATO countries sent only small contingents to the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns and, in many cases, sent no troops at all or hamstrung them with idiosyncratic rules of engagement.

In spite of their mutual membership in NATO, the United States and much of Europe continue to have significant disputes over trade and environmental policies. The U.S. security umbrella means that Europeans can invest more in social programs and economic development, enhancing their ability to compete with American companies. America’s NATO commitments also mean that we must spend significant borrowed money maintaining a bloated defense complex. 

Just as companies can face economies and diseconomies of scale, alliances may be made stronger or weaker if allowed to grow beyond a particular size. The most obvious example is the United Nations, originally sold as a worldwide collective security apparatus, which has, in practice, failed to obtain the kind of moral and practical power of more limited alliances. 

Newer and smaller NATO members like the Baltics or Bulgaria can contribute relatively little to Europe’s collective defense, but if they find themselves in trouble with Russia or anyone else outside NATO, they will impose burdens upon the entire alliance. If that happens, as Joe Biden put it, NATO’s mutual defense obligations become a “sacred obligation.” 

Under this protocol, the normal political process of deciding to intervene in a particular conflict goes out the window. The automatic quality of these defense obligations does not fully square with the American constitutional requirement of a congressional declaration of war and deprives our country of flexibility. 

Europe Can Defend Itself and Will Do So Without American Involvement in NATO

Even if one accepts our deep cultural ties to Europe and the need to prevent the rise of a “continental hegemon,” the claimed necessity of America’s involvement in NATO to defend Europe is a fallacy. It should be clear, whether one thinks Russia is winning or having an extremely tough time in Ukraine, that Russia’s ability to conduct a similar operation against Western Europe is negligible. In other words, Europe can meet its own security needs without American help, whether against Russia or any of the lesser powers in the world.

Much of America’s post-Cold War policy can be explained by the combined force of inertia and a lack of imagination among America’s national security establishment. For them, world history began in 1939, and American history in 1945. In this telling, the world was vindicated by the new era of American dominance, which began in World War II and was then deployed against its former ally, the Soviet Union.

For the managerial class stewards of American foreign policy, previous European history—the centuries of European religious and dynastic wars, our pointless intervention in World War I, our massive industrial expansion permitted by our distance from European wars, and our founders’ warnings about entangling and permanent alliances—have been completely set aside, never to be discussed. The reason is obvious: This longer historical record, both European and American, is an indictment of our continuing interventionist foreign policy beyond the unique conditions of the Cold War. 

NATO may be a benefit for small NATO nations, Europeans too cheap to fund their own defense, defense contractors, and fanatical anti-Russians. But it is not so clear what it does for the United States. As I wrote in an earlier piece, “An alliance system, where none of the allies can do much to relieve our burden, but much to increase our risk, is a dubious one.” 

Our ability to defend ourselves is fully secured by two oceans, a capable military, and an enormous nuclear arsenal. Rather than contributing to our defense, our membership in an expanding NATO will mean more conflict for the United States, and for Europe. 

X22, On the Fringe, and more- May 23

 

Thank you to everyone who helped comfort me last night when I was feeling like I was in a pit of despair. It means a lot more then you'll ever realize. 🥰 Maybe come later this summer, I'll have some positive new Hetty news to report on.

Here's tonight's news:

Joe Biden and Racial Demagoguery ~ VDH

Joe Biden’s cognitive challenges have stripped away his political savvy and left him in the raw, revealing his real essence—a racialist of the first order.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

Joe Biden has had a long history of racist outbursts. Can we even remember them all? The “put y’all back in chains” insults to an audience of black professionals, his dismissal of black interviewers variously as “you ain’t black” or ”junkie,” his he-man racialist Corn Pop mythologies, his recent condescending reference to a black professional as “boy,” and on and on. 

The Left has always contextualized his racial outbursts in the same fashion his decades-long creepy touching, sexual harassment, grabbing, and blowing into the hair and ears of young women and teens were always “just Joe being Joe.”  

So it was ironic but predictable that Biden went to Buffalo on Tuesday to leverage the recent carnage from the deranged, eco-fascist, racist, and insane lethal mass shooter of 11 African-Americans. Read the gunman’s manifesto: it is an unhinged collage of green fascist, racist, and politically incoherent mishmash.  

Purported right-wing monsters usually don’t hate Fox News and Ben Shapiro or go on endless green screeds. No matter. For Biden, as his midterm rendezvous looms ominously, the Buffalo shooter was useful in smearing his own political opponents. So Biden saw a trip to Buffalo as an opportunity, in a way other mass shootings were not, and made a rare excursion out of his secluded compound.  

The Great Asymmetries 

Biden’s despicable effort at blaming his political adversaries for the deaths failed for lots of reasons. He mangled his recitations of prior white-on-black shootings by including the recent Dallas shootings of three Asians by an African-American in his catalog of white-supremacist murders.  

Biden by intent ignored the near simultaneous mass shooting of Taiwanese parishioners by a deranged Chinese gunman.  

Of course, he has said nothing either in the past or in the present about the mass murdering by the black nationalist and BLM sympathizer Darrell Brooks. The latter deliberately used his car to mow down white children and elderly people. Most media outlets, given their selective indifference to the loss of human life, described the killings as done by a wayward SUV, as if it was driven on some sort of autopilot.  

The Left in general and Biden in particular scan the daily news for opportunities for racial demagoguery. When black shooters try to gas and maim white commuters on the subway, or when there is an epidemic of anti-Asian hate crimes committed disproportionately by black males, or an unhinged Bernie Sanders activist attempts to murder House Republican leaders, the Left is silent or insists the hard ideology or racism the shooter embraces is either irrelevant or somehow a natural response to some sort of provocation. Again, it selectively sees or does not see connections between political discourse and crazy people who commit mass mayhem—depending entirely upon the political ore to be mined.  

The effort to pigeonhole mass shootings for political gain necessarily results in hypocrisy, fantasy, and outright lying. Suddenly cars are animated objects. Black nationalist racial hatred expressed on social media is derided as right-wing talking points. Joe Biden cites African-American shooters of Asians as white-supremacist killers. 

In the end, we are left only with the surreal: an Al Sharpton screaming about the culpability of conservatives for the Buffalo shooting—this, from the racial arsonist of the age, who originally came to notice through his racial hatred and anti-Semitism that led to riots and death. Or a raving Joy Reid, known previously for her homophobic tweets and more recently for her nightly harangues about a current white collective that is communally guilty for the sins of those long dead.  

One of the strangest ironies is the Left’s denunciation of supposed conservative adherence to the “great replacement theory”—or the fear that nonwhite populations are by design replacing a dwindling white minority, and both are politically predictable by reason of their race or ethnic background. But if that were so, why would white conservatives abhor abortion that disproportionally destroys black and brown lives in the womb?  

In contrast, why do good progressives like the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg confess that abortion was targeting the proper people. (“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”)Further, why did current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen argue that black abortions were economically rational? “In many cases abortions are of teenage women, particularly low income, and often black, who aren’t in a position to be able to care for children, have unexpected pregnancies, and it deprives them of the ability, often, to continue their education to later participate in the workforce,” Yellen said last week. “It means that children will grow up in poverty and do worse themselves.” 

So once more, the Left projects. Replacement theories are a hallmark of leftist political science. They usually appear in triumphalist books and articles gushing about how “demography is destiny” and “the new Democratic majority” that will doom supposedly white Republicans and conservatives.  

Boasts about flipping red and purple states blue follow, as we are lectured that California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico are now blue due to unchecked immigration. So too, we are told, will Arizona and Texas soon follow.  

More perniciously, the Left does its best to restrict immigration from areas deemed problematic such as Cuba. So the “great replacement theory” is largely the Left’s name for conservative anger at the intentional destruction of our southern border—most recently in a time of a pandemic—to mainstream illegal immigration for largely selfish political interests. Demographic obsessions are largely a progressive fixation. 

Note that the Hispanic populations, galvanized by Biden’s culpably for high fuel prices, hyperinflation, support for radical abortion on demand, and, ironically, open borders, may soon split its political loyalties in November in a way once deemed unimaginable.  

If that happens, then the Left will likely recalibrate Mexican Americans as virtual Cubans and thus close the southern border, given illegal immigration will no longer be seen by their own admission as useful demographically. 

From Hypocrisy to Projection 

Three final points about the Biden demagoguery of race.  

First, the hypocrisy on race simply follows the hard-left double-standards on a host of issues.  

By all means let us sanction, condemn, and oppose Russia’s vicious attack on Ukraine. But the Left shows no such animosity toward a far greater existential threat to the United States—Communist China. It has destroyed an independent Tibet. It has absorbed and ruined a once democratic and free Hong Kong. It promises to end autonomy and democracy for Taiwan. And it has bullied and threatened every other consensual government in its neighborhood, from Australia and Japan to South Korea and the Philippines.  

The Left ignores Chinese culpability for hiding and obstructing the truth about the Wuhan lab origins of COVID-19 that has nearly wrecked civilization as we once knew it. It calls racist anyone who worries that China is waging a systematic effort to steal all the technology and research it can from the United States.  

Almost every leftist dominated institution, whether defined as corporate America, professional sports, Hollywood, or academia, refuses to call out systemic Chinese racism, reeducation camps, and the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur minorities, largely due to lucrative joint ventures.  

Similarly, the Left applies different standards to its own. In summer 2020, some 120 days of rioting, $2 billion in property damage, over 35 deaths, 1,500 police injuries, and the torching of an iconic church, police precinct, and federal courthouse were all contextualized. 

We were told the destruction of property was not really a crime, that the United States always has embraced violent protests, that flames licking the skies were not evidence of violence, and, by our current vice president, that such violence would not stop.  

And she was correct. The street violence did not cease, because it was seen as helpful for the 2020 election. When the looting, arson, and killing began to boomerang against the Left and was deemed no longer advantageous, the violence magically ceased in the final weeks before the election and throughout the Biden transitions and tenure.  

Contrast all that with the buffoonish, despicable riot in the Capitol by an ad hoc group of crazies. It was labeled an “insurrection.” The media then systematically lied about the five deaths that occurred on January 6, creating fables about the tragic natural demise of Officer Brian Sicknick. It smothered mention of FBI informants in the crowds, hid information about the circumstances of the lethal shooting of Ashli Babbitt and smirked about suspects put in solitary confinement for months without being charged or tried. 

The strangest embarrassment on the Left is its current neo-Confederate impulse. Many blue progressive states are becoming one-party, feudal societies reminiscent of the antebellum, plantationists, solid-Democratic South. They are likewise inimical to the middle classes who are fleeing California, Illinois, and New York. The new Left fixates—in the fashion of the old South—on one-drop racial identification integral to race-based preferences, oblivious of class and wealth.  

It promotes segregation on campuses, with racially exclusive safe spaces, dorms, and graduations. Its Southern embrace of nullification of federal law through over 500 sanctuary city jurisdictions is reminiscent of South Carolina in the 1830s. And it talks of state rights as if blue-state environmentalism, abortion, and illegal immigration should be exempt from federal statutes—in the fashion of George Wallace resisting federal mandates on integration. More recently, we see parlor talk of blue-state secession in journals like the Nation and The New Republic in the fashion of 1850s pamphleteering in the Carolinas.  

If Donald Trump did not accept the vote count of 2020, then it is legitimate to criticize him. But he was only following in the footsteps of the denialist Stacey Abrams. She toured the country after losing the governorship of Georgia by over 50,000 votes and was hailed by the Left for months as the “real” governor of Georgia.  

Lest we forget in 2016, the Left claimed a fraudulent election due to wired voting machines. Jill Stein sued to invalidate their ballot counts. Grade-C movie stars cut commercials urging electors to renounce their constitutional mandates. Hillary Clinton boasted of joining the “resistance,” claiming the elected president was illegitimate while urging Joe Biden not to accept the 2020 popular vote if he lost it. 

So why does the Left use these mass shootings, involving unhinged, hate-filled killers of all races, as fodder for their agendas? Why is it OK to harass Supreme Court justices at their homes or to threaten them by name outside the Supreme Court chambers?  

Hypocrisy is not hypocrisy when the Left feels its moral superiority justifies any means necessary to achieve its utopian ends. 

Smear Rather than Defend 

Second, the Left must have fungible standards and leverage tragedies for political advantage because it cannot run on its agenda. America was founded on principles of liberty and individualism, rather than French revolutionary government-mandated equality of result.  

Socialism has never appealed to Americans—and never more so than in the past 18 months. If Joe Biden had gone to both Waukesha and Buffalo, preached nonviolence and tolerance, and urged Americans not to judge one another as collectives but as unique individuals, he would have seen it as an opportunity missed to gin up furor by racializing tragedy. 

Indeed, what else could Biden do—run on a secure border and adherence to current federal immigration law? His wisdom of printing trillions of dollars, keeping interest rates artificially low, subsiding labor non-participation, and thus spiking inflation? 

Would he point to his brilliance in restricting gas and oil leases, suppressing energy development, and canceling pipelines to deny us affordable energy?  

Will he boast of embracing critical race and legal theories, defunding the police, backing city and county prosecutors who don’t prosecute, and emptying the jails and prisons, all resulting in a drastic increase in crime?  

Will he preen to midterm voters about the brilliant logistical effort that allowed Americans to flee Afghanistan near instantaneously while abandoning allies and leaving helpers behind while enriching the terrorist Taliban with billions of dollars in sophisticated U.S. weaponry? 

America Is a Great Experiment 

Finally, we should remember America has always been a fragile country. After all, it is history’s first successful and longest-lasting multiracial constitutional government—the logical reification of the ancient ideas of human political equality, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.  

The idea of America has always tried to overcome innate, deeper, and darker human impulses, especially the tic to identify by race, religion, and tribe. That is the historical virus that once unleashed, infects and destroys a society. Witness most recently Rwanda, Iraq, or the former Yugoslavia.  

The ancient human pathology to identify by superficial appearance—to see race, for example, as essential rather than incidental to one’s essence—destroys democracies. It must consciously always be repressed, not cultivated to frighten people to support agendas that are otherwise failing them.  

Joe Biden is said to be an inert puppet of left-wing masters. Perhaps. But more likely his cognitive challenges have stripped away his political savvy and left him in the raw, revealing his real essence, a racialist of the first order, who will use any tragedy to salvage what has become the worst two years of a presidency in modern memory. And most of the people now know it.

Here Comes the Fear Porn on Monkeypox From Joe Biden

Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

If you haven’t been concerned at all about monkeypox, Joe Biden wants to make sure that you are.

Biden is in South Korea, embarrassing us by doing such things as getting the name of the South Korean president wrong while standing next to him.

But he wanted to make sure that we got the fear porn, if we hadn’t yet.

“Everybody should be concerned about [it],” Biden said in South Korea, while speaking with a group of reporters before he boarded Air Force One for Japan, Reuters reported.

The president’s remarks come as numerous outbreaks of monkeypox were reported in Africa, followed by other reported cases in Europe and the U.S.

“We’re working on it, hard to figure out what we do,” added Biden.

While there are at least 80 confirmed cases of the disease worldwide and another 50 suspected cases, the U.S. has only confirmed a pair of cases after a man in Massachusetts was diagnosed with the disease. Another man in New York City also tested positive for monkeypox.

As my colleague Bob Hoge reported, monkeypox isn’t exactly new, it’s been around for many years, although it’s relatively rare. Indeed, there was a case in Dallas last year, and there have been cases in the U.S. before without anyone losing their minds over them. But what is making scientists wonder about this current spread is that people in Britain, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the United States, Sweden, and Canada, who are picking it up now seem to have had no travel to Africa before getting it.

From Nature:

But monkeypox is no SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, says Jay Hooper, a virologist at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland. It doesn’t transmit from person to person as readily, and because it is related to the smallpox virus, there are already treatments and vaccines on hand for curbing its spread. So while scientists are concerned, because any new viral behaviour is worrying — they are not panicked.

Unlike SARS-CoV-2, which spreads through tiny air-borne droplets called aerosols, monkeypox is thought to spread from close contact with bodily fluids, such as saliva from coughing. That means a person with monkeypox is likely to infect far fewer close contacts than someone with SARS-CoV-2, Hooper says. Both viruses can cause flu-like symptoms, but monkeypox also triggers enlarged lymph nodes and, eventually, distinctive fluid-filled lesions on the face, hands and feet. Most people recover from monkeypox in a few weeks without treatment.

There’s also a relationship cluster to gay men among the cases, and it’s believed to relate to the less serious strain in West Africa, where only about one percent in poor areas died.

There are no reported deaths in the current cases, although it is possible and there is a vaccine for monkeypox that was developed in 2019. After reports of the case in Massachusetts, the U.S. ordered 13 million doses. As Hoge observed, are they “not telling us something” here, when they’re buying that much? But it sounds like we’re putting a lot of money in some pharmaceutical company’s pocket.

Meanwhile, Belgium has become the first country to start a compulsory, 21-day monkeypox quarantine after the rise in European cases. People will be required to self-isolate for three weeks. Belgium has three cases so far.

While there were serious things to be concerned about with COVID, the reaction made a lot of things worse by the fear porn that was pitched by the government. As Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” We surely did find out how true this was over the past two years. And oh, here come the midterms. Don’t try to sell it to us again.

Kamala ❤️ Electric School Buses

Kamala loves electric school buses 

almost as much as she loves space.

posted by Dianny at Patriot Retort

Kamala Harris traveled next door to Virginia last week to promote electric school buses. And imagine my surprise when I learned she gave a speech at a high school.

After seeing the clips from her speech, I felt sure she was talking to a bunch of preschoolers.

Then again, Kamala recently delivered a speech to members of the US Space Force that also sounded like she was talking to a bunch of preschoolers:

But we all know how much Kamala loves talking about space, don’t we?

The so-called Second Most Powerful Person in the WorldTM takes on the grating voice of a condescending preschool teacher — full of childlike wonder and awe – whenever she talks about space:

Apparently, electric school buses also bring out this embarrassing, cringy side of Kamala Harris. Just as she did when talking about space, Kamala once again adopts that faux childlike wonder in delivering her speech about electric school buses while speaking to the audience as if they arrived there on the short bus:

As always, to really appreciate the cringe, read it out loud to yourself in your best condescending, “talking to special ed kids” voice:

“And so I think about this subject of our yellow school buses in that regard. Because think about it: Yellow school buses are our nation’s largest form of mass transit. How about that? Every day — [clapping] so, yes, and let’s applaud, because it gets ‘em where they need to go. Cackle-cackle-cackle!”

“You can see the yellow school buses with your own eyes! With your own eyes!”

Spoiler alert: Kamala never thinks about yellow school buses.

“And it was fantastic. The press actually rode on an electric school bus, just so you know. So I think they got the real inside feeling for what this means. Right? And so, what we all experienced is, on an electric school bus, on an electric bus: no exhaust. No diesel smell.”

“Now, I’ve spoken to a number of drivers, for example, who have recently switched to electric buses. And they stressed the importance of a quiet engine, which is much bigger than just you can have a conversation and hear each other; it helps the drivers hear the road, which, of course, helps keep our children safer.”

“Our children.” Okay, that part is hilarious.

Kamala Harris is a childless woman in her fifties. She has zero experience with children, which might explain why she speaks to all of them, from 8 months to 18, like they’re semi-retarded toddlers.

I don’t know why Kamala thinks talking like she’s a character on Sesame Street is a good way for the Vice President of the United States to promote an administration policy.

Because it isn’t.

Between her off-putting cackle and her cartoony delivery, Kamala comes off vapid and unserious, and by extension makes whatever she’s talking about, whether space exploration or electric school buses, sound equally unserious.

You would think someone in the Veep’s office would tell her that Americans already have a tough time taking her seriously so maybe it’s time to drop the preschool teacher act and start behaving like a Vice President.

Then again, maybe someone has told her, but Kamala is so bad at this, she just can’t help herself.