Why Palestine Fails

posted by Michael Widlanski at American Thinker 

Before creating another “Palestinian state,” let’s consider its chance of success.

We’ve had several different Arab states in and around Palestine. All failed, some disastrously. 

Will yet another Palestinian state envisioned by Anthony Blinken or some think tank become just one more “failed state,” indeed a state destined to fail?

Yasser Arafat’s PLO operates a corrupt and failing state-in-waiting on Israel’s eastern flank, in an area commonly called “the West Bank.”  It has failed in everything but terror for 30 years.

Well-meaning Israeli leftists, backed by well-meaning U.S. think-tanks and State Department officials, believed Arafat and the PLO had become “moderates.” They gave them Gaza and the West Bank, offering them a ready-made Palestinian state.

The PLO-Israel agreements of 1993-95 -- were meant to bring an era of peace.  Instead, they brought an era of terror: 2,000 Israelis were murdered in less than a decade.

From Day One, the PLO violated all pacts with Israel, smuggled weapons, staged terror attacks.

Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, pretends to be “moderate,” as he pays bonuses to terrorists who attack Israel, including Hamas terrorists in Gaza. 

Some naïve Westerners suggest a few Arab states should run Gaza, maybe the West Bank, too. History suggests that option would fail, as it failed in the past.

Jordan is already a sort of a fiction, a “trans” state with identity problems. Most “Jordanians” identify as Palestinians. Jordan is already scared of Palestinians and does not want any more.  The same is true of Egypt. They know why.   

Jordan ruled the West Bank from 1949-1967 as Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip. Both areas, meant to be Arab Palestine, were treated harshly, not given independence. 

Strangely, nobody demanded “freeing Palestine” from occupiers “from the river to the sea.”

After Arab states attacked Israel in 1967 (and lost), Israel retook Gaza and the West Bank, stifling terror. Israel hounded Arafat, who fled to Jordan where he re-established PLO bases.

The PLO unleashed a global age of terror. It hijacked planes and tried to abduct entire Arab states, nearly destroying them. The Palestinians became pioneers in terror. That is why today, in 2023,  not one Arab state offers to resettle them.

The PLO ripped apart Jordan in 1969-70, trying to erect a PLO state in Amman. King Hussein defeated the PLO and saved his country, evicting the terrorists. They went to Lebanon, where they ignited a civil war and built another Palestinian terror state headquartered in Beirut.

From there, Arafat launched more hijackings and the fatal attack on the 1972 Olympiad. Afterwards, PLO terrorists were often let go by Western governments afraid of more attacks.

The PLO terror state grew.  Local attacks on Israel’s northern border increased, until, in 1982, Israel defeated the PLO in Lebanon, evicting them to Tunisia.  A decade later, Israeli leftists rescued Arafat, bringing him back to Israel/Palestine in 1993.

In another “peace move” heralded by Israeli leftists, Ariel Sharon evicted Israel’s tiny civilian population from Gaza in 2005. Peace never came. Arab terror skyrocketed.  Literally.

Rocket attacks sped up after Hamas beat the PLO in elections. Putting Hamas on the ballot was a well-meaning peace move pushed by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.  There have been no elections in Gaza since, and also none in PLO-run territory.

One Man-One Vote, one time only.

Gaza’s exports went from home-grown Israeli flowers and citrus to home-grown Arab terror, what Hamas called muqawwama sarwakhiyya -- “rocket-propelled resistance.”

What have we learned? Why does Arab Palestine fail while Jewish Palestine – Israel -- succeeds? From Arafat/Abbas to Jihad/Hamas, Palestinian states become failed states, terror bases.

A successful nation-state requires a unifying national idea, a history, and an operational plan that is a vision of a hopeful national future. Palestine is a fiction. Palestine is a foreign word in Arabic, and it never appears in the Quran.

The Palestinian Cause (Al-Qadiyya Al-Filastiniyya in Arabic) was never a coherent Idea.  “Palestine” was an artificial symbol for Arab League summits, a Pan-Arab banner under which Arab states pretended to be unified.

Palestine was never conceived as a positive vision but as a vision to negate Israel.

One thing unites the PLO and Hamas: the idea of erasing Israel. They differ on tactics.

Hatred is enough to burn your neighbor’s home but not enough to build a home of your own.

X22, And we Know, and more- November 17

 

The Catastrophic Death of Fairness

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

Some social psychologists believe that humans are biologically wired to seek “fair” relationships with others.  Some theologians believe that the soul’s capacity for distinguishing right from wrong leads a moral person toward the same result.  Whether genetically or spiritually inclined to prefer fair outcomes, we humans are not comfortable around those who cheat and prosper from duplicity.  Cheating is ugly and therefore despised.

Systemic cheating, however, now dominates Western life.  Elevating “diversity for diversity’s sake” over all other metrics for gauging achievement has reduced merit and hard work to second-class virtues.  Rewarding illegal aliens with amnesty has cheapened the sacrifices of those lawful immigrants who have struggled to integrate into their new home countries.  Allowing delusional men to dominate women’s sports has cheated female athletes of a fair playing field for pursuing excellence.  In ways big and small, “woke” governments, corporations, and academic institutions cheat Western citizens of the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their own labors.

Of course, systemic cheating is disguised in language that sounds noble.  “Woke” Marxists use “fairness” jiujitsu to force disingenuous and unprincipled change. 

Unfairly promoting a less talented person over a more talented person because of his respective skin colors is celebrated as a victory for “diversity” — a reminder that in the twenty-first century, racists are still obsessed with how a person looks at the expense of what thoughts occupy his mind.  Without any public debates or votes, governments have replaced “equal treatment under the law” with “equitable” redistribution — or, in layman’s terms, “special treatment under the law” — so that certain classes of people can benefit at the expense of others.  

In an amazing instance of Orwellian “doublespeak,” the State categorizes those classes that are unfairly rewarded as “underprivileged” and the people against whom it discriminates as “privileged.”  Never in human history have people with “privilege” felt so marginalized.  All this cheating is done for the stated purpose of “including” many different kinds of people, but it depends entirely on “excluding” people to obtain fraudulently manufactured and prejudiced results.  

None of this is fair.  Stealing the earned successes of some, so that others may benefit without sacrifice, has a tendency to permanently scar both the victim of the theft and the supposed beneficiary.  When hard work and dedication are spurned, a seed of dejection is planted that can spoil an otherwise promising life.  When unearned rewards become expected entitlements, the enriching pursuit of human excellence withers and often dies.  

Aside from the damage to individual lives, though, systemic cheating destroys society.  If humans are hardwired to prefer “fair” outcomes, then the proliferation of “unfair” outcomes makes life deeply unsettling.  If pursuing “fairness” in our lives forms an integral part of our spiritual connection to God, then “unfair” systems cause moral havoc on the soul.  Cultural bonds become strained, and the shared respect for rules and laws soon slips away.  

What is the quickest path to anarchy and civil strife?  The imposition of an unfair and unjust worldview that rationalizes stealing from those who toil and punishing those who succeed.  When virtue is mocked as another imaginary form of “white supremacy,” then vice rots society and leads it to ruin.

The cost of undermining fair human relations is immense.  The U.S. Civil War took more lives than every other American war combined.  The Nazi-implemented Holocaust killed two out of three European Jews.  Some fifty million human beings remain slaves today.  Wherever and whenever unfair systems are permitted to propagate, immense human suffering is the result.  And when those unfair systems are eventually repudiated, further human suffering is the price for emancipation.

One would think that history has been painfully clear on this subject: nations that deny human beings equality under the law will be afflicted with great tribulation and may even disappear.  When different rules govern different categories of people, there can be no prospect for future peace.

Every year, U.S. universities pass over Asian-American applicants with higher grades and test scores in order to select new students from specially designated “underprivileged” categories, even though a disproportionate number of these Asian-Americans come from economically modest families who immigrated to the United States in the last two generations.  For so many of these Asian-Americans, hard work and discipline have been the keys to their academic success.  How have American universities rewarded their virtue?  By engaging in blatant discrimination based on the color of their skin.  Instead of highlighting Asian-American achievement as something that all Americans should emulate, so-called institutions of higher learning pursue “equitable” solutions that unjustly punish the most deserving.

These same universities — now a century into their transition from repositories for free thought to brainwashing factories growing the Marxists’ hive-mind — have become ground zero for the demolition of Western civilization.  In a masochistic form of irony, the same system of education that arose from centuries of Western pedagogy now seeks intellectual suicide.  The same institutions that arose from Christian monasteries and cathedral schools now excoriate all tenets of Christianity.  Western exploration, scientific advancement, philosophical debate, and rational enlightenment have all become targets for bowdlerization, if not outright censorship.  Politicized department chairs regularly remove literary masterpieces from graduate-level curricula in quixotic quests to fight “colonialism” and “white supremacy.”  

The end result has been anything but academic.  Its real-world repercussions include a century of college students who have only a tattered comprehension of the greatness of their civilizational inheritance and the darkness from whence it emerged.  While generations of Westerners have been taught to hate the foundations of their prosperity and strength, Islamic and communist civilizations can only laugh at the West’s self-indulgent nihilism.  The universities, having taken their anti-Western zealotry to its logical conclusion, have even succeeded in reigniting an antisemitic bloodlust as rapacious as during the slaughter of WWII.  And all of these dangerous consequences have come on the heels of the university system’s full surrender to a Marxist disease that infects students with hate under the pretense of “fairness.”

Having done their job to erase Western history and weaken Western souls, the colleges have filled the ranks of government bureaucracies, corporate boards, furtive intelligence agencies, and military roundtables with “woke,” anti-Western Marxists on foolish crusades for fake “fairness,” too.  It is only at this absurd juncture in history — when legions of the indoctrinated and insane have swelled beyond the constraints of reason, rationality, and moderation — that it is possible for the U.S. government to take the official position that it must brazenly discriminate against white people generally (and white males, specifically) simply because of their demographic strength. 

White men are passed over for scholarships, awards, and career advancements — not because they fail to compete, but rather because their successes have been judged “unfair.”  Jokes are made at their expense because they are the only category of person whose mockery and derision are permitted.  When white men engage in political protest, prosecutors target and harass them for alleged crimes that would never be pursued if not for their race.  Even as fewer white men attend college and more continue to exit the labor market permanently, they are preposterously blamed for sustaining the dreaded twin-demons of “patriarchy” and “white supremacy.”  Morally vacuous Joe Biden lectures the world that the greatest danger to the United States is not Chinese communism or Islamic terror or the World Economic Forum’s emerging globalist corporate oligarchy — but rather the elusive threat from poor, white men and their “hateful” speech.

Is it any wonder, then, why white men continue to exit the military, top businesses, and once respected institutions in droves?  They have gotten the message and have no interest in defending a system that uses them as scapegoats.  Such is the catastrophic price of sacrificing fair and equal treatment for all when the “woke” lead us into the moral wilderness.

Why Joe Biden’s Poll Numbers Are Even Worse For Democrats Than They Think

Democrats are stuck, and they did this to themselves.

Kylee Griswold reporting for The Federalist

Democrats have one huge, unavoidable problem. And his name is Joe Biden.

According to recent polls, GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump would beat Biden if the 2024 election were held today. A Quinnipiac poll out Wednesday shows Biden with 46 percent and Trump with 48 percent among registered voters, still within the margin of error and too close to call. However, a new Fox News poll, also out Wednesday, shows that in a head-to-head, the former president would prevail with 50 percent to Biden’s 46 — a number Trump has never garnered in a Fox poll going back to October 2015.

Do these numbers and thin margins mean anything? Maybe not. We are still a year from the election. And if 2016 taught us anything, it’s that polls are traditionally garbage and are used far more often as tools to shape public opinion than to reflect it.

But there are deeper and far more meaningful insights to mine from the survey, and they don’t spell good things for the Democrat Party.

For instance, it’s worth noting that not only does Biden appear to be losing generally to Trump, but the incumbent is losing his own dependable voters to his rival. Polls show Biden is hemorrhaging black, Hispanic, suburban, and young voters — all demographics that reliably vote Democrat.

It could have something to do with how Biden has handled major crises he’s either caused or exacerbated. According to Quinnipiac, voters disapprove of his response to the Hamas attack and subsequent fallout (54 percent disapproval to 37 percent approval), his economy (59 to 37 percent), his foreign policy (61 to 34 percent), his border crisis (65 to 26 percent), and his response to the Russia-Ukraine war (49 to 47 percent).

The implications are simple. Voters are confronting a rare moment in U.S. history in which they can actually compare what it’s like to live under the leadership, or lack thereof, of the two major presidential candidates. Do they want Bidenomics or the affordable grocery and gas prices of the Trump era? Do they want war in the Middle East — or Eastern Europe or the South China Sea — or peace? Do they want an open border or national security? The Trump-Biden decision is an increasingly easy calculation for voters to make.

So Democrats are stuck. And they did this to themselves, largely by closing off the possibility of a primary and instead committing to dragging Joe’s corpse across the finish line.

And yes, that really is the strategy. It’s not that Biden is a strong candidate by any measure, save for maybe his incumbency, but again, even that’s in doubt after his disastrous first term. He’s a demonstrably weak candidate, especially compared to Trump — another reality easily extrapolated from the polls.

On the Republican side — which, in contrast to Democrats, is still choosing to slog through primary election theatrics — the second-tier candidates are a notable governor and former governor, both beloved by their states and beyond. And Trump is still leading them by some 50 points. He’s got 48 points on Ron DeSantis and 51 on Nikki Haley. If prominent leftist governors such as Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer were to challenge Biden for the Democrat nomination, there’s no way he’d have that kind of lead.

This week there have been murmurs of a potential challenger — just maybe not who you would have expected. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was on Capitol Hill hobnobbing with Sen. Chuck Schumer on Wednesday and refused to answer reporters’ questions about whether he’ll run for president. This after he divulged last week that the parties did approach him last year.

And you can see the twinkle in Democrats’ eyes at the thought of dumping weak, old Biden for his antithesis. Here’s Schumer flirting with The Rock on X after their meeting, posting cutesy little lyrics from one of the actor’s Disney roles.

But while Democrats might view The Rock as an exit strategy, they still have a monumental problem to overcome: Voters aren’t just fed up with Biden, they’re fed up with Democrat policies both foreign and domestic.

There’s no denying Democrats have become the party of mass illegal immigration. Every town is a border town, and even urbanites are done with the Democrat policies overrunning their cities with aliens who suck resources dry. Speaking of cities, left-wing policies have destroyed them, from Portland and Seattle to Washington, D.C. Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies have caused violence in these places to skyrocket, with carjackings up more than 100 percent since last year and violent crime up 40 percent in our nation’s capitol. In fact, just this week D.C.’s disaster of a mayor declared a state of emergency because youth violent crime has gotten so bad. Meanwhile, Democrats have also become the party of inflation, war, no-limits abortion, transing kids, weaponizing the federal government, terrorist sympathizing, and every other anti-America policy position you can imagine.

That takes a strong leader to overcome. Sure, The Rock does a magnificent job at the role he plays in every movie, but he’s not that leader. And besides, would today’s Democrat Party really vote for a candidate who’s a Joe Rogan bro and friends with Trump supporters?

So Democrats are left to lie with sleepy Joe in the bed they made for themselves. It’s hard to feel sorry for them.

When Has War Even Been ‘Proportional?’ ~ VDH

Israel's conventional disproportionality is proving more effective than the terrorist disproportionality of Hamas

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

Proportionality in war is a synonym for lethal stalemate, if not defeat.

When two sides go at it with roughly equal forces, weapons, and strategies, the result is often a horrific deadlock—like the four years of toxic trench warfare on the Western Front of World War I that resulted in 12 million fatalities.

The purpose of war is to defeat the enemy as quickly as possible with the least number of causalities—and thereby achieve political ends.

So, every side aims to find superior strategies, tactics, weapons, and manpower to ensure as great a disproportionate advantage as possible.

Hamas is no exception.

Its savage precivilizational strategy to defeat Israel hinged on doing disproportionate things Israel either cannot or will not do.

First, Hamas spent a year planning a preemptive butchery spree inside Israel. Its ruthless murdering focused on “soft targets” like unarmed elderly, women, children, and infants, mostly asleep at a time of peace and holiday.

Second, it sought to collectively shock Israel into paralysis by the sheer horror of decapitating civilians, burning babies, mass raping, and mutilating bodies.

Another apparent aim of such premodern barbarity was to blame Israel’s “occupation” for turning Gazans into veritable monsters, with hopes of derailing the renewed Abraham Accords.

Third, the gunmen took more than 240 hostages back with them to Gaza.

Again, that was a disproportionate tactic designed to meter out the release of captives in exchange for “pauses” and “cease-fires” to save Hamas.

Additionally, Hamas made implicit threats of gruesome executions of captives unless Israel ceased their retaliation for October 7.

Fourth, all the while Hamas shot rockets into Israel, more than 7,000 in total, and all aimed at civilians.

Not one launch was preceded by dropping leaflets or sending text messages to Israeli civilians to vacate the intended target areas—a protocol often used by the Israel Defense Forces.

The unapologetic aim was to kill thousands of Israelis at random and disproportionately.

In fact, in just the last few four weeks, Hamas has launched more than twice as many rockets into Israel as Nazi Germany managed to launch V-2s into Britain in five months.

Fifth, Hamas sought to create a multibillion-dollar tunnel city beneath Gaza. The labyrinth’s sole purposes were to stockpile weapons and ensure safe havens for terrorists to shoot rockets and regroup after their terrorist missions.

Sixth, the subterranean headquarters of Hamas elites, along with weapons depots, were strategically placed under hospitals, mosques, and schools to “shield” them from Israeli attacks.

The expectation was that the IDF would be hesitant to target such “civilian” and “humanitarian” areas in a way Hamas never would.

Seventh, Hamas forced the civilians of Gaza to remain among the street fighting. They often shot those who resisted.

They also killed Gazans who fled the city. Hamas sought to increase civilian fodder as collateral damage from Israeli attacks. Such deaths were to be broadcast worldwide to win sympathy for Hamas terrorists and force a cease-fire.

Eighth, Hamas bragged that it could repeat strategies 1-7 endlessly on the supposition Israel would tire, the world would turn against it, and it at last could murder enough Jews to end Israel altogether.

Israel in turn seeks its own disproportionate response to defeat Hamas.

First, it seeks to single out and kill the actual Hamas terrorists, and especially the 2,000 or so killers of October 7.

Second, it tries to warn civilians to flee anywhere that Hamas masses. Just as Hamas wants its own civilians killed for propaganda purposes, so Israel seeks to avoid killing them.

Third, by targeting Hamas and warning civilians to keep their distance, Israel does not deny that there will be collateral damage.

But it hopes to convince the world that any civilian deaths are mostly the fault of Hamas and not the IDF.

And to the degree that Gaza City is left in rubble, Israel wishes to remind its enemies that the wages of murdering Jewish infants unfortunately will be a disproportionate response, whose full effects will deter any future attack.

Fourth, Israel understands that a country of 9-10 million is facing a virulently hostile 500 million-person Arab Middle East. The United Nations is on the side of Hamas. A now anti-Semitic Europe has been hijacked by immigrants from the Middle East. Israel’s sole patron the United States is buffeted by a hard-left new Democratic Party that is not a reliable partner.

The result is that Israel still cannot conduct a fully disproportionate war without endangering its source of military resupply in the United States, and a wider conflict with the Islamic world.

And so, the war continues.

Hamas strives for a more disproportionate terrorist agenda to prolong the war. And Israel strives for a more disproportionate retaliation to end it.

The anger arises at Israel mostly because it is Jewish, and thus far its conventional disproportionality is proving more effective than the terrorist disproportionality of Hamas.

Alexander Vindman's Wife Loses Her Ever-Loving Mind Over Congressional Run Criticism

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

If you thought the Vindman family would fade into obscurity, you thought wrong. Eugene Vindman, the brother of infamous Trump impeachment "witness" Alexander Vindman, is running for Congress. Why? I have no idea, but I'd assume it has something to do with an unhealthy thirst for political notoriety. 

Of course, if you want to win in politics, showing that your entire family is full of deranged lunatics probably isn't the best strategy. Unfortunately for Eugene, his sister-in-law decided to "fight" for him. It went so badly that she deleted her posts. 

Things started with some light criticism from a social media account with less than 10,000 followers.

Rachel Vindman then lost her every-loving mind. 

"Don't you dare" Rachel Vindman screams at some local political figure on the internet giving a rather tame opinion. By the second post, she was letting the expletives fly along with some not-so-veiled threats. How is she going to make this guy "sorry?" Why does anyone care whether she has "entered the fight?" 

I could try to analyze it further, but Occam's razor strikes again: The Vindmans are insane people.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the most fame-seeking members of the Vindman family are mentally unstable. The warning signs were all there back when Alexander Vindman was allegedly leaking classified information in order to prance around in his military uniform and pretend to be the savior of the republic. 

His wife has long been just as crazy as well. Recall that she once sent the following message to Rep. Elise Stefanik. 

@RepStefanik You have the blood of Ukrainians on your hands. When you hold your new baby I want you to think of the mothers of @Ukraine who will never see their children again because you abdicated your responsibility to hold Trump accountable for his extortion.

Even at the time, her post was psychotic given Trump gave weapons to Ukraine and Putin didn't invade the Eastern European nation until Joe Biden was president. But again, logic doesn't play into any of this. These people are just insane partisans who will morph any world event to fit their priorities. 

There's also the unmistakable air of entitlement around Rachel Vindman's public comments, which makes these inter-party fights so hilarious. Joshua Cole is a Democrat and apparently sees himself as some sort of gatekeeper. Eugene Vindman didn't kiss the ring before announcing and was immediately attacked. The speed with which the far-left is eating its own these days is rather enjoyable. 

Biden Can’t Be Trusted To Confront The ChiComs Who Pay His Family Millions

Biden and his family’s financial ties to entities connected to China’s communist government make him a liability for the U.S.

Shawn Fleetwood reporting for The Federalist

President Joe Biden met Chinese dictator Xi Jinping for high-level talks in California on Wednesday, marking the first time the two leaders have spoken face-to-face in a year.

While specific details of the conversation will assuredly remain under wraps, a White House readout of the discussion indicates that Biden and Xi covered a variety of hot-button issues, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s defense against Hamas terrorists in the Middle East, and Taiwan. The two leaders also agreed to revive communications between the U.S. and Chinese militaries.

Given Biden and his administration’s history of getting humiliated in talks with their Chinese counterparts, it wasn’t surprising that Wednesday’s meeting didn’t produce any headway on holding China accountable for its human rights violations, military aggression, or cover-up of Covid-19’s origins. But aside from Biden’s incompetence at juggling U.S. foreign policy, Wednesday’s U.S.-China talks raised a far more concerning question.

How can Biden be trusted to manage U.S. relations with China when he and his family have received millions of dollars from Chinese entities connected to the Chinese Communist Party?

The Paper Trail

Despite Joe Biden claiming on national television that his son, Hunter, “has not made money” from Chinese entities, the New York Post published a bombshell story in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, sourced to Hunter’s laptop, which called Biden’s assurances into question. Emails from the laptop showed Hunter had “pursued lucrative deals” with CEFC China Energy Co., a Chinese energy giant that operates as “an arm of the Chinese Government.”

As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reported, one email obtained by the Post showed Hunter describing a business transaction as “interesting for me and my family.” Another listed the younger Biden as “‘Chair / Vice Chair depending on agreement with CEFC’ with pay at ‘850’ and could offer monetary compensation for six people.”

“Those involved in the email from James Gilliar of the international consulting firm J2cR, including Hunter, were allegedly part of the four people who created a ‘provisional agreement’ to split 80 percent of the ‘equity’ of the company equally with ’10 for Jim’ and ’10 held by H for the big guy,'” Boyd wrote. While “Jim” is in reference to Joe’s older brother James Biden, a highly credible confidential human source has since corroborated that “big guy” was a moniker used to refer to Joe Biden.

Hunter’s dealings with CEFC often involved Ye Jianming, the since-arrested head of CEFC who has ties to China’s military. In early 2017, Hunter worked for Ye “as a counselor and adviser” and was later hired by CEFC in September 2017 to serve as defense counsel for Chinese businessman Patrick Ho, “despite his little experience in criminal defense.” Ho — who served as Ye’s “top lieutenant” and whom Hunter referred to as “the fucking spy chief of China” — was arrested and later convicted by the Justice Department for bribing the presidents of several African countries.

Bank records obtained by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office indicate that Hunter was paid $1 million for representing Ho. According to Yahoo News, however, “it is not clear what work, if any, [Hunter] did for Ho,” with court records of Ho’s case “show[ing] no indication that Biden or his law firm at the time … participated in Ho’s legal defense.”

A bevy of communication records released by the House Ways and Means Committee in September included a December 2018 WhatsApp text exchange between Hunter and Hallie Biden — who was the widow of Joe’s other son, Beau, and dated Hunter after Beau’s passing — lamenting Ho’s arrest and Ye’s disappearance. The records also showed how Hunter sold the Biden “brand” to overseas business associates to increase the family’s fortunes.

But as additional evidence released by House Republicans has shown, the Bidens’ financial connections with CEFC and its associates run deeper than previously known, and in several cases, further implicate Joe Biden. Despite the elder Biden repeatedly denying involvement in his family’s foreign business ventures, Hunter’s communication records indicate that Joe was keenly aware of his son’s overseas financial interests and served as a primary force behind the operation.

A series of July 2017 WhatsApp messages sent by Hunter to Chinese businessman Raymond Zhao show the younger Biden leveraging “his father’s name and threaten[ing] CEFC executives unless a lucrative deal was worked out with Ye.” In his messages, Hunter explicitly stated, “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.” He further threatened to leverage “the man sitting next to me and every person he knows” to punish Zhao should he fail to follow through on the arrangement.

Within 10 days of that conversation, a CEFC subsidiary poured roughly $5 million into a Biden-linked bank account. Bank records recently obtained by House Republicans show that on the same day, Hunter “transferred $400,000 out of [that account] and into his corporation, Owasco P.C.,” before wiring $150,000 of these CEFC-tied funds to a company owned by James and his wife, Sara, who withdrew $50,000 from said company and deposited the money into their personal checking account. Less than a month later, on Sept. 3, 2017, Sara signed a $40,000 check to Joe, claiming it represented a “loan repayment.”

As noted by The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland, “the $40,000 Joe ‘the Big Guy’ Biden received was exactly 10 percent of the $400,000 Hunter Biden received from CEFC.”

Untrustworthy at Best

At a time when China is becoming increasingly aggressive towards the U.S. and its allies, Americans need leaders doing everything in their power to stand up for U.S. interests and limit threats to their security. But with Biden at the helm, that’s no longer a guarantee.

Lunch Bucket Joe and his family’s financial ties to individuals and entities connected to Beijing’s communist government make him a liability for the United States. Americans can’t — and shouldn’t — trust that Biden’s judgment over anything having to do with U.S.-China relations is fully within their best interests.

New Poll: 54% of Democrats Want to See a Primary Challenge for Joe Biden

 Ward Clark reporting for RedState 

The news for old President Biden is getting worse day by day, and part of the reason it's getting worse is that it's becoming more and more apparent that he doesn't comprehend that it's getting worse. Now, a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows a strong majority of Democrats want to see old Joe gain a credible primary challenger.

The Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that 54 percent of Democrats surveyed want to see another Democrat challenge Biden in the party’s primary. Roughly 28 percent of Democrats said they did not want another Democrat to challenge Biden, and 18 percent said they were unsure.

Younger voters are more likely to say they want another Democrat to challenge Biden. Nearly 70 percent of those ages 18-29 said they wanted another option in the primary, and 61 percent of those ages 30-44 agreed.

Nearly half of respondents ages 49-64 said they wanted to see a Democrat challenge the sitting the president, and 43 percent of those 65 and older said the same thing.

Note the qualifier named above: A credible primary challenger. That's key.

When asked about who they would vote for in the Democratic primary, Biden still maintained a comfortable lead, with 64 percent saying they would back him. Biden’s only Democratic challengers so far, author Marianne Williamson and Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), each received only 4 percent of support.

Twenty-six percent said they were unsure of who to vote for in the primary, and 2 percent said they would not vote.

Remember when I said "credible?" Well, Marianne Williamson is not exactly a mainstream Democrat, and Dean Phillips has the name recognition of... a really anonymous guy.

But Joe may be about to face a more serious primary challenger, although the person in question hasn't officially tossed his hat in the presidential ring yet.

This poll, of course, is just the latest in a series of unfortunate events for the Biden 2024 campaign. As we've noted in the past (many times) Joe Biden was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, even in his supposed prime when he was still aware of his own plagiarism and character assassination. Now he is clearly far too dependent on the woman who (again) would be Edith Wilson to Joe's Woodrow (being the power behind the throne like this must be a pretty groovy gig.)  Whether he is mumbling about "climate change" or trying to coherently address other major world leaders, he just fails, every time, with monotonous regularity. 

The guy is, simply, way past his sell-by date.

Polls that show him running behind the likely (at this early point) Republican candidate don't help any. His understudy? Even worse. At this point, the closest thing the Dems have to a savior, at least where the really noisy "progressive" wing is concerned, appears to be holding off for now and waiting until 2028, when he will face fewer partially fossilized candidates. This is a trend we've been seeing for some time now, and with every new poll, with every whistling-past-the-graveyard interview with administration officials and campaign staffers, with every new event where Joe has to be led off the stage, it just gets more and more obvious.

One has to think the Democrats are asking themselves at this point, "Is it too much to ask to have a candidate that didn't attend college in the Silurian?"