'Pushing the Envelope' Toward What?

posted by Richard Kirk at American Thinker

How has America been transformed from a society that largely embraced the virtues of temperance, individual responsibility, respect for parents, and the obligation to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” into a nation whose popular culture propagates messages that promote self-gratification, entitlement, and absolution for all personal vices by vilifying living and long-departed white, heterosexual, and Christian victimizers.  No single explanation accounts for this devolution into depravity, but one major reason falls under the artistic rubric known as “pushing the envelope.”

“Cutting edge” and “daring” are other terms linked to this highly praised characteristic that’s gone from increasingly explicit sexual references to uncensored depictions of sexual intimacy to dramatic portraits of aberrant behavior (50 Shades of Grey) to the dramatic and in-person sexualizing of children (cf. Cuties, drag shows for kids, and a gender agenda for K-6 innocents).  In tandem with this pushing of the sexual envelope has been critical applause for progressively more realistic depictions of violence, moving from largely anodyne Lone Ranger gunplay to blood-soaked Sam Peckinpah violence to the chest needle-stabbing scene that graces the “classic” film Pulp Fiction.  This envelope is pushed even further when sex and violence are intertwined in ways that would amaze even a sadomasochist like Alfred Kinsey.  Law and Order SVU (Sexual Victims Unit) represents the sanitized popularization of this illicit union under the cover of law enforcement.

Thanks to this relentlessly praised envelope-pushing, premarital sex is now as passé as the serial bedroom romps (one bordering on incest) to which Charlie Sheen’s dramatic nephew was blithely exposed on Two and a Half Men.  Casual sexual dalliances even constitute the non-controversial subject matter permeating programming like the seemingly innocent Seinfeld program -- a theme that became explicit in the “cutting edge” show, Sex and the City.  Currently MILF Manor lines up several mothers opposite their sons for an incest tease since it’s only an adjacent stud who chooses to be “with” the mom.  

This drive toward sexual license received an exponential shove with the near universal employment of cable’s less-restrictive standards which allowed generations of American youths easy access to the debaucheries of MTV, a network whose primary product was aptly described by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind:  “Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV…  A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism… In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”

As bad as MTV is, the Internet provided a look at the final destination toward which all this envelope-pushing was headed:  the most degrading pornography imaginable short of not-yet-kosher snuff films and the increasingly-defended predilections of “minor-attracted persons.”  Thus, the envelope being pushed is finally exposed as a libertinism that disguises a descent into depravity behind terms like “progress” or “artistic freedom” and disparages moral restraints as old-fashioned, judgmental, and close-minded.  Broken families, crime, homelessness, drug addiction, and a plethora of other pathologies are the byproduct of this drive to dismiss ethical standards that are themselves blamed (via repression and intolerance) for the maladies plaguing society and its presumptively good-natured inhabitants.  

Piggy-backing on this dissolution of moral restrictions, advertisers tout 24/7 the imagined bliss of lives focused on the immediate gratification of sensual desires while mindlessly echoing social causes du jour that provide absolution for their myopic focus on corporate profits.  When the product being peddled has little to do with pleasure, ads utilize our corrupt cultural Zeitgeist to push insurance products via a campaign that makes “becoming like your parents” a fate that requires therapeutic intervention.  Thus is the cultural envelope pushed beyond honoring father and mother (two now-verboten terms) as Madison Avenue confidently declares we stand on the shoulders of embarrassing Pygmies.

In the late 50s a prescient Stan Freberg provided an image of our cultural future with a radio comedy bit that featured two Vegas clubs, the El Sodom and Rancho Gomorrah, each of which sought to outdo the other’s envelope-pushing acts.  The concluding “performance” on the strip simply wasn’t going to be outdone by the other establishment.  It was “The H-Bomb”! The wind and silence that followed the aural atomic blast foreshadow what awaits us (literally or metaphorically) as we continue “pushing the envelope” toward oblivion.    

And we know, On the Fringe, and more- Feb 5

 

I'm getting a pretty good feeling about the next 2 weeks. :) What am I talking about? Maybe I'll reveal it one day. 

Here's tonight's news:

Peace Through Strength or Chaos Through Senility?

The Chinese would not have been deploying spy balloons over U.S. nuclear installations if Donald Trump was still president.

by Roger Kimball for American Greatness

Where’s Laocoön when you need him? News that the Chinese have a huge balloon loitering high above the middle of the country—just where, wouldn’t you know, we have a bunch of ICBM silos sited—reminded me about the reaction of the ill-fated Trojan prince when he saw the gigantic wooden horse sitting on the beach in front of Troy. At the beginning of book two of the Aeneid, our hero, with a heavy heart, accedes to Queen Dido’s request that he tell her the story of Troy’s downfall and his ill-starred voyage to her court. Infandum, Regina, iubes renovare dolorem: “O Queen, you bid me renew an unspeakable grief.”  

But he does as she asks, beginning with the story of the Trojan horse. The Trojans were divided in their opinion about the monstrous equine. Some thought it was a Greek gift or trophy or memorial to commemorate their departure. Laocoön knew better. Rushing down from the town to the beach, he cried

Poor Trojans, have you lost your minds? . . .

‘You think they’re gone? Are any Greek gifts given

Sincerely? Don’t you know Ulysses better?

The Greeks are hiding in this wooden gadget, 

Or else this is a siege machine they’ve built 

For spying or alighting on our homes,

Or some such trick. Don’t trust the horse, my people.’

Then comes the famous line: timeo Danaos et dona ferentis: “I fear Greeks even when they are bearing gifts.” 

Well, nobody thinks the Chinese are bearing gifts. But the response to that minatory skyborne bladder has ranged from Laocoön-like alarm to amused indifference. The Pentagon says it doesn’t think the blimp poses a threat, but then the Pentagon is home to General Mark “White Rage” Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd “Stand Down” Austin. Not much joy from that Keystone-Kop quarter. 

News that a second Chinese balloon—I wonder if these dirigibles have the likeness of President Xi painted on them—is wafting about somewhere over “Latin America” (not a terribly precise designation) raised eyebrows, but again not much is known about its purpose. The Chinese said the first balloon was an errant weather balloon that was blown off course and wound up over highly sensitive American military installations. Imagine that. 

As for the second balloon, is it over Mexico, Tierra del Fuego, or somewhere in between? If Mexico, that’s not far from Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, all of which feature abundant military installations. I believe most observers suspect, as I do, that the balloons are not meteorological but espionage tools. Or maybe something more sinister. According to the Pentagon, again, the balloon carries a surveillance pod “large enough to be concerning if there were a debris field,” which is why, the Pentagon also said, it decided not to shoot it down. (But isn’t there a lot of empty space across the fruited plain?) Instead, they have made their concerns known to the PRC, more or less, I assume, the way that Hans Blix made his concerns known to Kim Jong Il in “Team America.” In what is sure to have been a crushing blow to the Chinese, our version of Hans Blix, Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled his trip to China at the last minute. So there.

(News has just arrived that later Saturday afternoon fighters from U.S. Northern Command shot down the balloon off the South Carolina coast. Of course, Biden let the balloon traverse the entire continent before taking it out.)

I’m serious about the “crushing blow,” by the way. I’m sure the Chinese were looking forward to having another opportunity to humiliate Blinken as they did in Anchorage shortly after the Biden Crime Family Chief Capo took office. 

Some news reports say that China is embarrassed by Balloongate because it is attempting to repair relations with the United States. Well, some news reports will say anything. More pertinent, I fear, are the many reports from American military and political observers that China is listing more and more bellicose. I don’t agree with Mike Pompeo’s neocon penchant for invading other countries, but he is right that Biden’s weakness “assures Chinese aggression.”

It is worth remembering that during Donald Trump’s first term as president (note that I say “first term”), America and indeed the world was a more pacific place. Russia did not invade Ukraine. Iran was bottled up. The Abraham Accords brought peace to the Middle East. Amazing.

How did he do it? By taking a page from Ronald Reagan’s playbook. Next to “Make America Great Again” (and perhaps laments about “fake news”) the phrase that one heard most often from the Trump campaign and, then, the Trump Administration was “peace through strength.” It was born of Trump’s understanding that weakness is provocative and destabilizing while recognized strength encourages peace and social order. 

Biden has depleted our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, shuttered the Keystone Pipeline, and put the kibosh on fracking. He has gone a long way towards transforming the United States military into a gender fluid sensitivity camp while also undermining the U.S. economy by incontinent spending and by pursuing other inflationary policies. Biden and his puppet masters tried to stymie Trump by turning his catchphrase “MAGA” into a negative epithet (and if “MAGA” is bad, how much worse is “Ultra MAGA”?). As Julie Kelly remarked, “if the balloon was an unarmed female veteran, the government would have shot it by now.”

But it didn’t work. So-called MAGA policies really did “make America great again”—richer, more secure, more confident and patriotic. He did these things by pursuing several simple, commonsense policies—picking the right judges, cutting taxes, closing the border to illegal immigration, and so on. High on that list of commonsense pursuits was the policy of “peace through strength.” The Chinese, I feel confident in asserting, would not have been deploying spy balloons over U.S. nuclear installations were Trump president. Neither, for that matter, would Vladimir Putin have invaded Ukraine. 

Peace through strength. It works better than Biden’s “Chaos Through Senility.” I doubt that Donald Trump was a student of the Roman military writer Flavius Vegetius Renatus (floruit circa 350 A.D.), but he would agree with his famous aphorism si vis pacem, para bellum: “if you want peace, prepare for war.”

Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency warns of massive global hacking attack

 

Organisations across the world have been warned by Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency about a massive global ransomware hacking attack on servers.

 

Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency today, Sunday, February 5, warned organisations globally to take imminent action to protect their systems. Their advice came after a hacking attack was carried out on computer servers across the world.

According to the Agency, thousands of computers across the world have been compromised by a massive ransomware hacking attack. Speaking with the Reuters news agency, Roberto Baldoni, the ACN director general, told them that the hacking attack sought to exploit a software vulnerability. It was on a massive scale he added.  

Servers have been compromised across the world, including in the USA, Canada, Finland, and France reported Italian news outlet ANSA, citing the ACN. Organisations throughout Italy are very likely to have been affected by this attack. To avoid being locked out of their systems, the ACN urged them to take preventative action.

Earlier today, large parts of Italy were affected by a massive internet outage. The problem was reported by Telecom Italia although the issue was not thought to be connected to the hacker attack. TIM blamed the incident on a glitch with an international link.

Customers from as far afield as Sicily in the south of Italy to Milan in the north of the country reported problems with their internet services.  

https://euroweeklynews.com/2023/02/05/italys-national-cybersecurity-agency-warns-of-massive-global-hacking-attack/    

Sifting through the Mess of the Ukraine War

posted by Gary Gindler at American Thinker

Almost a year has passed since the latest Russian aggression against Ukraine.  Counting aggressions in 1917–1918 and 2014, it would be the Third Russo-Ukrainian war.  From the outset, it was an unusual conflict.  For example, this war, even if it is waged on land, resembles a war on the high seas.  On the battlefield, everything is observable during the day and visible at night via infrared optical systems.  There is nowhere to hide from drones and satellites.

However, the fundamental feature of the war is that nobody was ready for war — not Russia, Ukraine, or their allies.  By the day of the invasion, the Russian army was embezzled, the Ukrainian army was disassembled and had not reassembled, and NATO armies were depleted.   

With artillery, for detail, the American industry currently produces about fifteen thousand 155-mm howitzer shells per month; typically, Ukraine uses five thousand shells daily.  Thus, Ukraine uses a month's worth of American shell production in three days.  That is not sustainable.  Overall, the present war demonstrated widespread ammunition shortages, exacerbated by the mostly peaceful post-WWII decades.

From the White House perspective, the war in Ukraine is out of control.  The working hypothesis is that President Biden, in a Chamberlain-like move, had committed to giving about one fifth of Ukraine to Putin.  According to the AP, the U.S. planned to "press Ukraine to formally cede a measure of autonomy within its eastern Donbas region, which is now under de facto control by Russia-backed separatists."  Most likely, the deal was made during Biden's and Putin's meeting in Geneva in July 2021.  After that meeting, CIA director Burns visited Moscow at least four times.  One of his "achievements" was the unprecedented Russian military buildup on the border with Ukraine, dubbed "military exercises."

It appears that the Putin-Biden pact limits Russia's appetite to the Donbas and Crimea only.  Recall the logically unexplained withdrawal of Russian forces from Kyiv.  Also consider the collapse of the Russian frontline in the Kharkiv region in the north of Ukraine and the Kherson sector in the south.  All things considered, these embarrassing events for Putin could easily be explained as necessary steps to comply with his side of an arrangement with Biden.

But surely Biden will soon realize that this is the same disastrous gentlemen's agreement as with the Taliban.  (Note that the Afghanistan fiasco was happening practically in parallel with the Kremlin negotiations.)  He must have felt double-crossed, for instance, when Putin attacked areas of Ukraine (like the capital city of Kyiv) that were not part of the Putin-Biden deal. 

Russian propaganda dubbed the inglorious Russian withdrawal from Kyiv a "goodwill gesture."  As such, it was ridiculed by mass-media punditry, which grossly misinterpreted it.  It was, in fact, a "goodwill gesture," but not regarding Ukraine's territorial integrity.  Instead, it was a "goodwill gesture" to affirm the Putin-Biden deal to partition Ukraine.

So, in February 2022, Putin violated the agreement, Biden went ballistic, and the dollar waterfall into the Ukrainian Treasury commenced.  The money and armaments will pour into Ukraine from the United States Treasury until Putin withdraws back to February 24, 2022 borders, or American funds run out — whichever comes first.

To facilitate monetary support for Ukraine, Biden reactivated a money-laundering conveyor that had lain comatose since President Trump's time.  The original laundering mechanism operated like this: the cash flood from American taxpayers was returned (after the Ukrainians got their cut) to American soil — into the coffers of the DNC in the form of "foreign investments" and "donations."  Next, of course, the "big guy" got his cut from these "investments" and "donations," too.   

That scheme of financing Democrats using American voters' funds was operational during the previous Ukrainian cabinet.  Then, after the Ukrainian elections in 2019, two months into Zelensky's presidency, President Trump gently expressed the desire to shut the conveyor down.  Democrats considered that, quite correctly, an existential threat.  So Trump got his first impeachment.

Can the American Treasury run out of money?  Easily.  The United States is on the verge of another debt ceiling political fight.  Since the debt ceiling was reached in mid-January 2023, the United States Treasury can no longer borrow money.  As a result, the overall balance of tax payments (credit) and the budgetary obligations of the federal government (debit) will turn red in June.  Unless the House gives in, June will mark the United States' insolvency and the last massive infusion of greenbacks Ukraine gets.  Such are the consequences of Keynesian economics, which lives on borrowed time (and money).

Another fast-approaching deadline is October 1, 2023, the federal government's beginning of the new fiscal year.  The current remittance influx into Ukraine was approved by Congress (the "old" Congress, that is).  The brand new balance of power in Washington means dangerous uncertainty for Ukraine.  Therefore, Ukrainian military commanders have clearly defined deadlines to drive the aggressor away.  Unless European allies step in, October 2023 should be considered the hard stop for Ukraine.  On or around that date, the uncontrolled, non-audited, and presumably wasteful stream of payments from the United States into one of the most corrupt regimes (at least before the war), but still prone to endemic graft scandals, will probably end.   

Why are other NATO members reluctant to share more weapons and ammunition with Ukraine?  Everyone has at least two examples before him.  First, when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, Ukraine suddenly became the third-largest nuclear military power on Earth.  Ukraine surrendered its nuclear missiles to Russia in 1996 and decommissioned its launch silos by 2001, but what did it get in return?  The second example is that Ukraine gave Russian-made Buk air defense missile systems to Georgia when Russia attacked Georgia in 2008.  Georgia has not returned the Ukrainian Buk systems.

The assistance NATO participants provide to Ukraine has reached a staggering one third of the military budgets of these countries.  Consequently, some Western artillery in Ukraine began to exceed its corresponding numbers in several NATO members.  At first, NATO threw away its army surplus.  Afterward, some, but not all, NATO countries began to give away everything available.  For instance, the Danes gave away 19 French-made Caesar howitzers, which was all they had.

As strange as it sounds, Ukraine's sole feasible option to repel invaders is to boost corruption on both sides of the Atlantic.  Such Machiavellian cynicism is necessary because the next Russo-Ukrainian war is practically a given.  Ukraine's young leadership quickly learned the lesson and acquiesced to restart the money-laundering conveyor.  From there, nobody should expect any drastic change in Ukrainian strategy until they conclude that the money game is over.  No Ukrainian offensive operations will materialize until the cash windfall is exhausted.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are trying to collect as much in arms as possible.  They undoubtedly understand that it is a once-in-a-lifetime event, and there will be no second chance.  Nobody will be able to reassemble the current anti-Russian coalition in the future because arsenals worldwide have been severely depleted.

The primary culprit, Putin, opened Pandora's box by attacking Ukraine.  Instead of closing the lid at the first sign of trouble, he brainlessly threw himself into it.  Then Putin barricaded himself in and sealed Russia from the outside world.  The next entity foolhardy enough to start this process again will set loose Russia's never-dormant imperial ambitions, triggering the Fourth Russo-Ukrainian War.

Meet The ‘Really Very Crunchy’ Mom Who Turned Her Holistic Life Into Viral, Educational Comedy

‘It just feels hilarious and surreal because I am the most awkward person ever and also the most average mom. Just a mom just making fun of her life,’ says Emily Morrow of Really Very Crunchy.

Jordan Boyd reporting for The Federalist

Emily Morrow may seem normal, but one glance at her thrifted clothes and iconic bottle of homemade kombucha confirms she’s certainly not mainstream.

“I would describe myself as a very regular mom. I guess not like a mainstream mom, though,” Morrow told The Federalist. “I just have an interest in holistic living and I’m also a very sarcastic person, so I can see the humor in the choices that I make.”

Morrow is the star of @reallyverycrunchy, one of the most followed holistic social media accounts. Her humor-filled spin on the natural lifestyle she embraces earned her more than 1 million followers across TikTok and Instagram since the accounts’ creation in 2022.

“It just feels hilarious and surreal because I am the most awkward person ever and also the most average mom. Just a mom just making fun of her life,” Morrow said.

Corporate media accuse viral advocates of natural living like Morrow of “radicalizing” vulnerable new parents with dangerous, “anti-science” information. In reality, influencers like Morrow just want everyone to learn how to think for and laugh at themselves.

Underneath the quirky facade she puts on her internet shorts is a woman inspiring her followers to think for themselves, evaluate what they are putting in their bodies, and prioritize how they are spending their time with their families.

“It should never be about somebody making the wrong choice. Just about you making the right choice for your family,” Morrow said.

Crunch 101

The Morrows first stumbled upon the crunchy lifestyle during their mission to save money on food. At the time, the Morrows were living in an RV and trying to calculate how to maximize their nutrients while keeping the grocery bill low.

“I read somewhere that if you only buy processed foods that have five ingredients or less, then it cuts out a lot of the stuff that you eat. Really, that was more of like a money-saving thing for me than a healthy eating thing. But it made me start looking at ingredients, which sparked my interest in, ‘Why are there so many crazy ingredients in the food I’m eating? What is this?’” Morrow said.

When the Morrows had children they “had to make decisions for,” they then decided to commit to a holistic life.

In late 2021, the Morrows realized Emily’s passion for healthy living and Jason’s interest in content creation could be harnessed to create online humor. The couple went to work writing, filming, and producing videos exaggerating and mocking Morrow’s affinity for eating veggies off of the vine, toad husbandry, and sharing the healing power of breastmilk.

The Morrows started out with a small goal: make and post one satirical video every day in 2022.

“By our eighth video, the one about crunchy mom at a birthday party, that one went viral, and then it kind of went crazy from there,” Jason said.

Parodies about “mouth tape” and “store-bought bone broth” may be niche but, as evidenced by thousands of likes and comments, they clearly resonated.

“If you’re crunchy, you can laugh at it. If you know someone who’s crunchy, you can laugh at it. If you hate crunchy people, you can laugh at it because it is sort of outside looking in how you feel like crunchy people are,” Morrow said.

In addition to portraying herself in the now every other day skits, Morrow plays characters based on stereotypes — some truer than others — and how they react in countercultural situations.

“Juniper’s mom,” an overzealous woman who scoffs when Morrow falls short of ultimate crunch, is rivaled by “silky mom,” a sugar-loving woman in a Coca-Cola tee who is always on the hunt for her kids’ iPads. Well-meaning but nicotine-addicted “Aunt Claudia” occasionally makes an appearance in the shorts, as does barefooted “Shady,” a dealer who sells coveted health goods such as unpasteurized raw milk and elderberry syrup to crunchy moms.

After a few well-received appearances in early videos, Jason also started playing himself, a well-read husband who lovingly tolerates his wife’s odd, organic-inspired antics like oil pulling and ribbon dancing by moonlight.

Jason may be less crunchy than his wife, but even he admitted in one skit that if he “had to do it over,” he would “live every crunchy moment with you again.”

“The people who really get it realize that it’s Emily’s self-deprecating humor. She’s making fun of herself and then turning it up about three or four notches,” Jason said.

Trading Toxins For Truth

Going viral prompted Morrow’s followers to beg for more content and even more advice about how they can embrace more natural living. That’s exactly what Morrow plans to share in her upcoming book, which will be published by HarperCollins in one year.

“It’s basically going to be a tongue-in-cheek guide to being really very crunchy,” Morrow said.

Morrow said the book’s tagline, “Removing toxins from your life without adding them to your personality,” is a nod to how hostile the crunchy world can be, especially to newcomers.

“One thing that I think, in general, the holistic community fails at is they get so judgmental,” Emily said.

Committing to a non-mainstream lifestyle can get expensive, overwhelming, and even induce worry about making the healthiest choices possible. That is why Morrow said anyone interested in becoming crunchier should make “one little decision at a time.”

“Don’t allow it to consume you with anxiety, because anxiety is far more harmful than the silky or non-crunchy choices that you would be making,” Morrow said.

The best place to start, according to Morrow, is to “evaluate your habits and ask yourself why.”

“Start questioning why you’re doing what you’re doing and what exactly you’re doing,” Morrow said. “For example, food. What food are you eating? Where did it come from? What are the ingredients? And why do you feel good about eating it? That’s going to be different for everybody.”

Morrow also said eliminating screens and teaching kids life skills like cooking is a great place to start.

“It’s cool to see your kids learn new things,” Morrow said.

Contrary to what her “crunchy or not” series may suggest, Morrow said there’s no “right” way to explore how to live a happy, healthy, intentional life.

“People make a big show out of their choices. You can quietly make decisions. If somebody is curious, they can ask you why. And you can answer without it being full of shame,” Morrow said. “If you want someone to support the decisions you’re making for your family, you have to do the same for them. Even if you don’t agree with what they’re doing, as far as crunchy toys, or feeding their kids Cheetos, or whatever. It’s really none of your business.”

New North Carolina Supreme Court Sends the Left Into Fits of Rage

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

The reckoning has arrived in North Carolina.

As RedState reported, the prior leftwing Supreme Court majority went nuts prior to the 2022 election, knowing its tenure was not long for this world.  Now-ousted Democrat members handed down multiple rulings that ignored the law. One decision struck down voter ID and another invented a constitutional provision against gerrymandering.

At the time, some warned that such an abuse of power wouldn’t hold up under the new Supreme Court. Sure enough, they were right.

As expected, the Democrat judge who authored the original horrible decisions (and still remains on the court) is throwing a fit. Justice Anita Earls claimed that the decision to relook at the cases is a “display of raw partisanship” and an abuse of power.

Do you know what else was unprecedented? Earls completely made up a North Carolina law that prevents so-called gerrymandering. There was never a legal argument for a partisan fairness standard in redistricting, yet the old Supreme Court ruled that anyway in order to help Democrats in the 2022 election. It almost worked too, with Democrats only missing the House majority by the smallest of margins. Had North Carolina been allowed to redistrict under the actual stipulations of the law, the GOP majority would be much larger today.

The crying about breaking precedent is also ludicrous given Earls and her old colleagues continually broke precedent to shove through far-left rulings over the last several years. The moment conservatives take the reins, though, everything from the last term is supposed to stand? Yeah, that’s not how any of this works. Earls can cry a river because things are only where they are because she overstepped her bounds.

It can’t be understated how big of a deal this is for future Republican prospects. With such a slim House majority, keeping the chamber in 2024 is going to be a real fight. With North Carolina likely to redo its redistricting, you could be talking about 3-4 extra House seats. That could be the difference between the majority and the minority.

This situation is a good lesson in why even the less sexy elections are very important. The way you enact change is across the board. Republicans can have the legislature, but if they don’t have the Supreme Court, nothing that is passed will be allowed to stand.

After Criticizing Trump Over Classified Docs, Mike Pence Springs Docs Trap On Himself

Pence shunned Trump when the FBI raided him with the pretext of classified documents. When Pence gave unelected agencies ammunition to come after him, Trump defended him.

Jordan Boyd reporting for The Federalist

The Department of Justice plans to execute a search of former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana home after the Republican revealed last week that his lawyer found about a dozen classified documents in his house.

His designated representative wrote in a letter to the National Archives that Pence “was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence” and “stands ready and willing to cooperate fully with the National Archives and any appropriate inquiry.”

His apparent “cooperation,” a pretense corporate media keep using to excuse President Joe Biden for hiding classified documents in his office and homes, appears to have spared him the ire former President Donald Trump received from the media, the Biden regime, and the FBI when classified documents were recovered from his home in August.

Trump even rushed to defend his former right-hand man when Pence outed himself to the feds.

“Mike Pence is an innocent man. He never did anything knowingly dishonest in his life. Leave him alone!!!” Trump said on his social media platform, Truth.

Trump’s defense of Pence wasn’t just surprising thanks to the Republicans’ hot-and-cold relationship. It was especially magnanimous considering Pence’s previous statements dunking on Trump for keeping top-secret information in his home.

Shortly after the FBI raided former president Trump’s home in August, Pence reassured the media that he did not take any classified documents when he left the White House.

Then after briefly acknowledging in a tweet that the raid on Trump, authorized by Merrick Garland himself, appeared to be politically motivated, Pence later declined to cast judgment on the situation. “I honestly don’t want to prejudge it before until we know all the facts,” he said.

But despite initially casting aspersions on the Justice Department’s “unprecedented” actions, Pence had no problem using the DOJ’s targeting of Trump as an excuse to further trash the man who elevated Pence to the White House as vice president.

“I’ve not hesitated to criticize the president when I think he was wrong. And clearly, possessing classified documents in an unprotected area is not proper,” Pence said in an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd in November.

Pence was clearly not eager to defend Trump as his new book, “So Help Me God,” detailing the end of his “close working relationship” with the former president, was scheduled to hit the shelves in November. Even before Trump’s document raid, Pence spent months publicly clashing and then distancing himself from the administration and president he once served.

“People want to get back to the successful policies of the Trump-Pence administration, but some of the most ardent Republicans in the country had pulled me aside and said, ‘We need leadership that will unite the country around our values,’” Pence told Todd.

More than two months after the raid, Pence was still flipping between gently disagreeing with the DOJ for sending “the wrong message to the wider world,” and also firing at Trump by going so far as to say that “there would be no reason to have classified documents” — even as Pence himself had classified documents.

By the time Pence gave that interview to yet another corrupt corporate media outlet, the FBI was already aware that Biden had classified documents in his Penn Biden Center and would soon learn of several other batches of material hidden next to the corvette in Biden’s Delaware garage.

That news didn’t hit the media until the new year. After that, it only took a couple of weeks for Pence to come forward with sensitive papers his lawyer found stored in his home. Once again, Pence showed a complete lack of understanding of the political situation the nation faces, with the deep state flexing its muscles to give unelected bureaucrats tacit control over elected officials.

Pence made a mistake in overconfidently stating he did not have possession of top-secret documents. His bigger mistake was spending far too much time trying to set himself up for a White House run following the 2020 election instead of trying to unite the party and maintain proper skepticism of weaponized U.S. intelligence bureaucracies whose actions are increasingly akin to those of banana republics.

While Trump stayed consistent in his classified document messaging, Pence blew his one chance to unite Republicans and Americans around an issue most of them agree on: the deep politicization of the FBI and DOJ.