American Weakness Invites Aggression

posted by Joseph Puder at American Thinker 

In November 1979, Iranian “students,” inspired or directed by Ayatollah Khomeini, stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran, Iran.  A weak Jimmy Carter administration emboldened the attack, which resulted in 52 American diplomatic staff being held as hostages for 444 days.

The capture of the U.S. embassy amounted to a declaration of war on the U.S.  Yet the Carter administration, instead, betrayed the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, by warning him against a crackdown on the revolutionary demonstrators.  The Shah, suffering from advanced cancer, was indecisive in his response, thus enabling the revolutionaries to take the initiative. 

Carter’s attempt to rescue the American hostages by launching a military operation — too limited in scope — was an unmitigated disaster.

The ayatollah’s perception of newly elected president Ronald Reagan was one of a strong leader who would react forcefully against Iran.  The Islamic Republic took no chances and immediately released the hostages.

In a similar vein, the weakness of the Biden/Harris administration, and its refusal to declare its willingness to use the “military option” against Iran and its proxies, including Hamas and Hezb’allah, convinced the Hamas terrorists that the time was right to launch the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.  They massacred and took 251 civilians off to Gaza as hostages, scores of whom were American citizens.  In the aftermath, there were no repercussions against any of the perpetrators.

Clearly, Iran would not have given Hamas a green light to attack Israel had it feared a military reaction from the U.S.  The ayatollahs, eager to prevent any Israeli-Saudi rapprochement, and realizing that they were safe from any retaliation or from a possible defense alliance led by the U.S., sent Hamas the go-ahead signals.

In both instances, history has shown that weak American administrations encouraged the attacks.

In the Islamic Middle East, where cultures respect military strength and despise weakness, the Biden/Harris administration is disrespected.  The defensive postures of the Carter/Biden/Harris administrations provided adversaries with confidence that their actions would not result in an all-out war.  They were correct with regard to the Americans but failed to gauge Israeli resolve. 

Israel’s latest attacks against Hezb’allah in Lebanon has destroyed much of the latter’s missile arsenal and the launchers to fire them.  The elimination of the Hezb’allah leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah, its secretary general and supreme leader, and his second-in-command, Hashem Safieddine, considered to be his successor, has sent a clear message to Israel’s adversaries and re-established much of the deterrence it lost on October 7.  Simultaneously, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have destroyed Hamas’s command and control and eradicated of 23 of its roughly 24 battalions in Gaza.  

The U.S., being a superpower, should be feared, but the U.S. eschews winning wars and simply opts for quiet and a “business as usual” posture, which is eroding its deterrence and respectability.

It has been a year since Hamas took Israeli and American hostages, and others, into the Gaza tunnel dungeons.  The Biden/Harris administration has followed Jimmy Carter’s lackadaisical attitude of using words rather than actions.  Had the U.S. put real pressure on Hamas by warning of direct military actions unless the hostages are released, the reality would have been vastly different.  If Biden/Harris had threatened the leadership of Qatar and Egypt with decisive action, they would have understood that actions have consequences.  The U.S. could have removed its bases from Qatar and relocated them to the United Arab Emirates or Bahrain, which might have prompted the Qatari Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated regime to intervene and achieve real results, especially since Hamas depends on Doha for its monetary survival.  Similarly, inasmuch as Egypt is a major recipient of U.S. military and financial aid, the threat of losing that aid might have forced Cairo to earnestly compel Hamas to release the hostages.  But then again, when it comes to Jewish hostages, it seems that the Biden/Harris team has not been and is still not in a hurry to act.

The Biden/Harris administration has continually pressured Israel to agree to a ceasefire while demanding that Israel allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip.  No such demand was made to compel Hamas to allow Red Cross visitations and to deliver medicine and food to the Israeli and American hostages.  The Hamas terrorist leadership was therefore assured that the U.S. administration is impotent.  Instead of the Biden/Harris administration denouncing Hamas for using civilians as human shields, and holding Hamas responsible for most of the Palestinian civilian deaths, Israel was blamed for allegedly using excessive force.  In fact, Hamas was able to sell its stolen humanitarian aid at inflated rates and use the funds to recruit new fighters.

Appeasement of Iran in recent years has only bolstered Iranian aggression.  Seeing the Biden/Harris team as weak and indecisive, Iran’s proxies in Iraq and Syria targeted American bases and personnel with impunity.  The absence of American retaliation was an embarrassment on the world stage and only reinforced Iran’s perception of Biden’s and Harris’s America as a paper tiger.  Any actions taken by the administration were always defensive and further encouraged the Islamic Republic, the leading global sponsor of terrorism, to act without fear.  The Iranians even attempted to assassinate Donald Trump on American soil on the heels of having marked other Americans.

Just prior to Iran’s April 13, 2024 massive attack on Israel with 300 drones and missiles, President Joe Biden pointed a finger at Iran, saying, “Don’t, don’t,” meaning “don’t launch your attack.”  Iran’s subsequent attack showed the level of disrespect and disregard the Iranian Islamic Republic has for the Biden/Harris administration.

On October 1, 2024, Iran attacked Israel once again — this time with 180 ballistic missiles.  In the interim, Iran has been accelerating its uranium enrichment program, with some forecasting breakout within weeks, and Iran has hacked into Trump’s election campaign websites and leaked information to the Harris headquarters.

The Biden/Harris administration, much like the Carter administration, has failed to understand that “soft power” in the Middle East does not work.  Its projection of weakness has invited Iran’s aggression.

He the People - How Barack Obama ended normalcy in American politics

The people have spoken, and last week former President Barack Obama called Vice President Kamala Harris to tell her. His endorsement of her run for the presidency was captured in a short video documenting the candidate’s reaction. “Although you called for an open process,” said Obama, “and you know, Democrats have, have put in place an open process, it appears that people feel very strongly that you need to be our nominee.”

 

But without a primary, without a popular referendum, without even the open convention that Obama was rumored to favor, how did the people make their will known, and strongly? Was it social media influencers? Mass rallies across the country? Media chronicling the excitement surrounding a Harris candidacy? No, it was nothing like that. Obama is the people. The people are Obama.

 

The endorsement was more than five years in the making. Obama had long wanted her in that spot. Their families are old friends. Like him, Harris is progressive, multiracial, physically attractive, nominally hip, a child of academics—in other words, according to Obama-friendly media, she’s a “female Barack Obama.” He directed donors to support her 2020 presidential campaign, Capitol Hill sources told me at the time. More billionaires, 47, backed her campaign than any other candidate’s—with Obama strongholds in Hollywood (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas) and Big Tech (Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, Craig Newmark, etc.) leading the way.

 

Obama got her the vice presidential nod even when she was forced to drop out of the primary race after hitting just 3 percent in the polls. Jill Biden objected—Harris had called her husband a racist! The First Lady’s reported recent tantrums show that even after four years, she never fully grasped the arrangement the party had made with her husband. Biden was just an imperfect placeholder for Obama, and it was only a matter of time before the superior avatar would be slotted in.

 

The question is when, exactly, did it become clear to Obama that it was time for Harris to finally replace Biden? Was it after Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump? After the attempted assassination of Trump? No, it seems the countdown officially began Oct. 7. The Palestinians’ murderous assault on communities in southern Israel exposed Biden’s limited ability to represent the interests of the party he was tapped to temporarily preside over. It didn’t require an especially refined moral sensibility to be appalled and terrified by the carnivalesque depravity of Oct. 7—but to give Biden credit, he evidently was. And that was the signal his time was up.

 

He‘s no John Fetterman. Biden is not a particularly courageous friend of the Jewish state, nor does he appear to much value the strategic importance of an ally that lessens America’s burden in a region vital to U.S. interests. When it comes to Israel, the 81-year-old president is just a normal late-20th-century Democrat who likes the country well enough, recognizes Jews as an important albeit small voting bloc and a crucial source of campaign funds, and performs ritualistic contempt for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

But last Wednesday’s pro-Hamas riots in Washington, D.C.—in which domestic left-wing extremists linked arms with Middle East terror supporters and other foreigners to burn the American flag, deface monuments, and brawl with police, all in the name of protesting Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of Congress—was only the latest evidence that the crux of Biden’s Oct. 7 problem was not that Michigan and Minnesota’s voter rolls are swollen with advocates of Muslim and Arab terror.

 

The issue was not a party constituency at all, but rather the party itself and its leader. Barack Obama fundamentally reshaped the party when he struck the 2015 deal legalizing the nuclear weapons program of Hamas’ sponsor, Iran. By legitimizing the apocalyptic foreign policy aims of the world power that embodies Jew hatred, Obama sidelined the Jews and other centrists and made the progressive, anti-Israel faction the party’s new center of gravity.

 

The media did yeoman’s work obscuring the details and purpose of the agreement, but the fact is, by putting Iran’s bomb under a protective American umbrella, Obama was arming an American adversary to make it his own ally. The Iran deal was the first clear sign that Obama was not a normal U.S. commander in chief. When Biden extended even half-hearted, halting support to Israel’s response to Oct. 7, he crossed the only real red line Obama has ever had. Harris—who, unlike Biden, has no foreign policy beliefs or instincts of her own—never will.

 

Like friends, our favored allies reflect back to us the qualities we are flattered to find in ourselves. For instance, when Netanyahu spoke of the lions of the IDF, the elected representatives of the American people were stirred not only by the thought of Israeli boys and girls on the front lines but also—in fact, primarily—by the image he implicitly evoked: the image of our best and brightest, our lions, risking their lives to serve America. When he spoke of the God of Israel, the Americans might as well have struck their chests like patriarchs and shouted, “That’s us, too, brother—America also has a covenant and with the same God!”

 

How did aligning with Iran, a threshold nuclear power that threatens to destroy Israel, change the Democratic Party? It means, for instance, that political analysts speak openly on TV about how Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Jewishness makes him a problematic number two pick for Harris. Nominating a Jew, the media reports, will split the party. And what partnership with an anti-American regime means for America as a whole was illustrated when violent rioters pulled down the American flag in the U.S. capital and replaced it with the banner of a terror enclave that has been holding American hostages for more than nine months.

 

What we saw outside Union Station is Obama’s faction. Local, state, and federal bureaucrats, as well as minorities, single women, academics, labor unions, and even Jews are all still welcome to vote Democrat. But the party’s vanguard, its true believers, its street fighters and enforcers, are allied with the terror gang that broadcast its campaign of rape, torture, and murder on Oct. 7. Mainstreaming the psychological modalities and media techniques of the Manson family is not normal in America. These are not normal times in America. But then again, as Obama’s Pulitzer-winning biographer David Garrow explained, “He’s not normal—as in not a normal politician or a normal human being.”

 

Proof that the mob outside Union Station is protected is that the few who were arrested were swiftly released—even those who assaulted police officers. The opposition was quick to compare law enforcement’s treatment of the death-cult auxiliaries who marched on the Capitol to Jan. 6 defendants, thousands of whom were rounded up, detained for months, charged, and convicted with sentencing enhancements that will keep some, like Proud Boys’ leader Enrique Tarrio, behind bars for two decades.

 

It’s a two-tier system of justice, say Trump supporters: We get jail time and they have get-out-of-jail-free cards. But that’s not accurate. A two-tier system of justice is one in which Black teenagers can’t afford the legal representation available to white kids with wealthy parents. The current system is rather one in which law is an instrument the regime uses to punish political opponents. In the current system, everything is licit for the ruling party. That is, the current system is lawless.

 

The end of normalcy in American politics has left Americans in a daze, unable to accurately grasp the new reality or to recognize its alien features. Some say Biden was toppled in a coup, but that’s wrong. It was never truly his presidency in the first place. He was serving in a ceremonial role on behalf of a politburo, and thus his executive authority owed less to his total 81 million votes, 58 percent of which were mail-in ballots harvested on his behalf, than to his former boss who saw him as the most plausible vehicle through which to exercise power. But Oct. 7 and the aftermath showed that Biden couldn’t be trusted to balance the appearance of normalcy with the psychopathy of the faction’s priestly warrior class. So his time was up.

 

It was Obama’s voice you heard when Harris spoke after her meeting with Netanyahu. One day after pro-Hamas mobs desecrated the American flag, Harris lectured Americans on the dangers of “Islamophobia.” But what does that mean? No one is going to the streets to beat up Muslims or burn Palestinian flags or celebrate the slaughter of Arab infants. “Islamophobia” is a made-up concept, designed to give cover to the terror adjuncts laying waste to American cities and college campuses. Criticize them or their historic cause—i.e., murdering Jews—and you’re Islamophobic. And that, as Obama likes to say, is not who we are as Americans.

 

Harris’ speech was filled with Obamaisms: pairing antisemitism with Islamophobia and “hate of any kind,” foisting responsibility for “Palestinian self-determination” on Israel, and urging Americans not to see the war in Gaza as a “binary issue.” That is, Americans should forsake the moral clarity that comes naturally to them because, as Obama said in November, we have to “admit” that “nobody’s hands are clean.” Americans have to take in “the whole truth.” See, it’s nonbinary.

 

Harris is ridiculed for her vacuous rhetorical style, but Biden was never a good stand-in for Obama’s gaseous speechifying, and the dissonance has long unnerved the new Democratic base. Never mind the habits and ticks that stuck to the old man after nearly half a century in Washington; by 2020, he could barely string two sentences together no matter who typed his speeches into the teleprompter. With Harris, however, Obama has an ideal instrument through which he can speak directly and in his preferred prose. She’s an empty vessel. What listeners hear in her is the immediacy of Obama, which is precisely what the party—the people—crave.

 

The opposition, meanwhile, is struggling to recognize the contours of the new political anatomy. Those who can are often hesitant to call it what it is, for fear of being called a bigot for recognizing that normalcy in American politics came to an end with Barack Obama, who happened to also be the country’s first Black president. Discretion is laudable, up to a point. But when Obama lieutenants leak to the media that Obama is calling the shots, as they have been since the debate, it’s clear that fear of being called a racist has nothing to do with it. The failure to frankly identify the source of our political abnormality is a cause for concern.

 

We are now in the second decade of a phenomenon previously unknown in American politics. Instead of identifying it, dissidents have devised formulations to avoid naming it, like the deep state or wokeness or DEI, etc. But these are just the adornments of a deracinated regime, and to cast an amorphous leviathan in the role of adversary is to commit to a never-ending and ultimately unwinnable struggle. It is in this space where people lose hope, for it’s a vacuum that engenders the culture of the conspiracy theory—elaborate and colorful accounts of despair explaining that we have no control over our lives, our fate, the future of our families, communities, or our country because of hidden forces that are too big and too entrenched.

 

The truth is that an American political faction is employing third-world tactics—surveillance, censorship, election interference, political prosecution, and political violence—to put the United States under the thumb of a single party led by a man who in his mind has become the people.

Prescott AZ speech, And we Know, and more- Oct 13

 

Who Normalized Political Violence in America?

 It wasn’t Donald Trump, or Joe Biden

Democratic Party officials and media deny that there’s any connection between their inflammatory rhetoric labeling Donald Trump a fascist, would-be dictator, and even Adolf Hitler and the attempt on the 2024 Republican candidate.

 

But media executives must believe Trump supporters have a point or MSNBC wouldn’t have given Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski a 24-hour timeout Monday to put some distance between the shooting and the fare that Morning Joe has been dishing out for nearly a decade.

 

Same with music industry executives who canceled Jack Black’s worldwide music tour after the funnyman’s bandmate told an Australian audience that his birthday wish was “Don’t miss Trump next time.” Politics aside, no concert promoter was going to pay the insurance premium required to host a band that celebrated attempted murder.

 

Republicans on Capitol Hill are angry at The New Republic after a recent issue put an image based on a Hitler campaign poster on its cover. The editors claim they weren’t entirely committed to the Trump=Hitler formula, but, as they wrote, “he’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.”

In a way, left-wing journalists who say it’s not their fault the 20-year-old man whose adolescence was saturated with murderously anti-Trump rhetoric tried to kill Trump have a point.

 

The media is reactive, not creative. Democrat-aligned media didn’t invent the idea that the Democratic Party’s 2020 candidate was, despite massive video and audio evidence to the contrary, cognitively 100%. They just sang from the sheet they were handed.

 

And when Joe Biden proved incapable of finishing a sentence without devolving into gibberish during his debate with Trump last month? It wasn’t the media that left him out there to melt like a Madame Tussauds simulation of a living person. In fact, the media was embarrassed by Biden’s performance—and in front of the people they hate most, Trump supporters, who have been saying for four years that Biden is in obvious decline. So, the media reacted—Joe must go! But that’s not their call. If media personalities had real power, no one would have dared muzzle Joe and Mika, not even for 24 hours.

 

So, who created the climate of political violence?

Some propagandists lay the blame squarely on Trump. After pro forma denunciations of the attempted public execution of the opposition leader, a chorus of establishment stalwarts, like George Stephanopoulos, and David Rothkopf, and others argued that Trump and his aspiring assassin were cut from the same cloth: “The gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory,” wrote David Frum, “are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.”

 

In other words, not only is Trump responsible for inciting Jan. 6—the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11, etc.—but he has polarized the country so profoundly that he is ultimately responsible for the attempt on his life.

 

That’s Hamas logic:

 

The violence of our victims drove us to burn them alive. Thus, the left is laying down the predicate for future violence against Trump and the half of the country that supports him: It’s OK to target them because being “at both ends of the bullet’s trajectory,” they brought it upon themselves.

 

No, the violence came from the left. The question is, who from the left is responsible for cultivating it? It’s not the media, and it’s not Joe Biden, either.

With the Democratic Party’s internal upheavals about replacing the incumbent, the left has openly acknowledged that the shadow presidency isn’t a MAGA conspiracy but fact.

 

All the party’s chatter centered on Obama, identifying him as the man holding the party’s reins and directing its messaging: Did he sign off on George Clooney’s op-ed calling for Biden to step down? What was the true meaning of Obama aide David Axelrod’s tweet that the debate over Biden’s candidacy should have happened a year ago?

 

Or when another Obama hand, David Plouffe, said it was DEFCON-ONE moment for Biden? Who did Obama prefer for 2024: his former vice president he made the 2020 candidate or the unelectable also-ran he slipped into the No. 2 slot to sneak her past the electorate when Biden’s malfunctions proved, finally, irreparable? Was the moment ripe for Operation Kamala?

 

As it happens, the timing backfired on Obama. The attempt on Trump’s life leaves him holding the bag. If Obama is responsible for calling the shots, then he must also be held accountable for them.

 

It’s no surprise that the left’s investigation into the roots of our current round of political violence has carefully avoided mention of the riots that filled college campuses across the country and the streets of American cities with Palestinian terror advocates. Indeed, the fascist-fighting New Republic now employs a pro-Hamas reporter. “Good morning,” Talia Jane tweeted over a picture of Israel’s border being overrun on Oct. 7. This wasn’t terrorism, she explained, rather it was “state oppression vs rebellion against state repression.”

 

In an article for TNR, Jane defended: antisemitic protesters at a Manhattan exhibit commemorating the hundreds killed by Hamas at the Nova festival; vandals targeting the homes of Brooklyn Museum administrators for calling the police on violent protesters; attacks on pro-Israel Columbia University professor Shai Davidai; and terror supporters filling a subway car asking other riders to “raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.” It could have been dictated from a Doha hotel hosting Hamas leadership.

 

But Jane’s ideology is not that different from the message Obama pushed into the mainstream of the Democratic Party. “The occupation, and what is happening to Palestinians, is unbearable,” is how he framed the Oct. 7 massacre for his former staffers during a Pod Save America panel in November.

 

And this wasn’t just talk. How did 2024 Brooklyn come to look and sound like 1938 Berlin? In part, according to U.S. intelligence officials, it’s because Iran funded and incited the pro-Hamas demonstrations. Where would the regime that arms and pays for anti-American terror and embodies Jew hatred get the idea that it’s OK to participate in the American political system by creating the conditions for a nationwide pogrom?

 

In 2015 the Obama White House struck an agreement with the Islamic Republic, legalizing its nuclear weapons program and thereby legitimizing the tactics it employs to accomplish its strategic goals—political violence, i.e., terrorism. The Iran nuclear deal was the instrument with which Obama normalized political violence.

 

Another Obama instrument cultivated it. Shortly before leaving office in 2017, Obama instructed his CIA Director John Brennan to produce an intelligence community assessment claiming that Vladimir Putin helped put Trump in the White House.

 

The purpose of the official assessment wasn’t just to undermine his successor’s presidency and hobble his administration with phony investigations sourced to the perverted fantasies of an FBI informant once employed by British intelligence.

 

No, lending the U.S. government’s executive authority to an information operation contending that one half of the electorate supported a foreign agent to govern the country was designed to destabilize America. Its purpose was to drive its citizens against each other.

 

That’s where we are today, still. These are the signs of a destabilized polity: the widespread prosecution of political opponents that was normalized in the wake of Jan. 6; mandating vaccines and villainizing those who resisted experimental medical treatments; recasting Trump supporters as domestic terrorists; opening borders to usher foreign criminals into middle-class communities; convicting elderly women for praying in front of abortion clinics; dispatching the FBI to raid the home of the opposition leader, unlawfully deputizing an officer to prosecute him, and most recently, but likely not summarily, the attempt on his life.

 

Trump said that, after what he went through, he couldn’t very well say the same words he’d planned to say Thursday night in a broadside attacking Biden. Rather, he needed to send a message of unity—which in this case is a story about redemption.

 

Americans know how to hear those stories because we’ve been telling them to ourselves and others from the beginning, starting with George Washington himself. The narrative thread goes through the Civil War, catching Lee as well as Grant, and up to the present. It seemed once that Obama, too, having attached himself to the mythography of Lincoln, was part of that story as America’s first Black president—and maybe he will reappear there in the future, rather than leave his mark in the book of America where it is now, in the chapter of Ahab, the maniacal completionist.

 

The best stories we invent about ourselves all partake of the same longing, from Shane and Gatsby to Rocky and the Hunger Games. May this latest and perhaps most improbable protagonist of the great American story continue to draw on the source of redemption granted him by providence.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/who-normalized-political-violence-america

Democrats Are Hitting the Panic Button Early

posted by Derek Hunter at Townhall 

Scratch a Democrat and find a racist. As Kamala Harris travels the country, going from one ass-kissing interview to another, the rest of the Democratic Party establishment is starting to worry. You can’t polish a turd, but you can distract from the fact that it is a turd…but only for a while. Sooner or later, the emperor has no clothes, the sheep runs out of wool, and you’re left standing there with a turd. That’s where the Democrats are now.

The thing about Kamala Harris is the more people see her, the less they like her. She almost lost her first race for Attorney General of California…to a Republican; she was so bad as a candidate. She wins in a walk, at least in California, when she has a horrible opponent. 

After announcing her run for president in 2019, Harris polled very well and raised a ton of money. Then, people saw her on the campaign trail and heard her in interviews. Support for her collapsed to the point that she had to quit the race before a single vote was cast. Her polling as Vice President tracks right along with this – when she was made Border Czar (and she was, everyone knows it) and put in charge of voting rights (which seems to consist of mostly complaining about voter ID), people paid attention and did not like what they saw. Kamala Harris was less popular at the depths of Joe Biden’s unpopularity.

She made the perfect buffer for Biden: no matter how bad she looked, standing next to her, he looked better. 

After the coup, she’s all they have. There is no plan B. And as much as Democrats love abortion at any point, a public one in the 720th month is too much even for them.

Since no conceivable case can be made FOR Kamala Harris – and they aren’t even trying, offering only as much detail as “We want to do good stuff” – they must find another way to motivate their voters. And that other way will not be charm or personality – no one wants to drink a Miller High Life with Kamala. 

Enter the ex-presidents. 

You know things are bad when Democrats break out Bill Clinton. Hillary, fine, but Bill? It's a little awkward after so many of them publicly condemned Bill during the “Me Too” movement, albeit in a self-serving way. Then again, when the candidate’s husband has impregnated an employee, ruining his first marriage, and is alleged to have pimp-slapped an ex-girlfriend in public for daring to talk to another man, paid her $80,000 to get her to sign a non-disclosure agreement to not talk about it. You realize there is nothing resembling shame or decency left in the Democratic Party.

Honestly, at this point, there’s really only a credible rape charge difference between Bill and Pimp Doug Emhoff, so why not use him?

Then there’s Barack Obama. While not accused of rape by anyone, as far as we know, he’s about as lucky of a charm on the campaign trail as a room full of smashed mirrors; just ask Massachusetts Senator Martha Coakley. 

In his pitch, Obama went right to his favorite thing to do: talk about how awesome he thinks he is.

As president for eight years, Obama was the first president in the modern era never to achieve 3 percent GDP growth in any year; his final year was only 1.4 percent, and he was on the way down. He spent his administration whining about what he inherited from George W. Bush to justify why his economy was so bad. Then, after promising the country that Trump’s economic policies, especially his tax plan, would ruin the economy, President Trump’s economic policies were signed into law, and the economy boomed. Now, Barack is claiming credit for that. It's weird how he wants credit for what he said would be bad; what he said would ruin things after he was proven wrong. 

More than his economic illiteracy, Obama exposed just how far down the panic hole Democrats were when he told a group of black men that Harris wasn’t doing well with “the brothers” because they didn’t realize they had to vote for her. After all, she shares some melanin with them. Obama said, ““On the one hand, you have somebody who grew up like you, knows you, went to college with you, understands the struggles and pain and joy that comes from those experiences.” 

That’s just a weird argument, considering it is completely devoid of any policy discussion. It’s just that she’s black. Well, half black, Obama ignores her Asian half because he can’t use it. 

But very few people “grew up” like Kamala – the child of 2 tenured professors at major universities, the child of privilege who spent her formative years on the mean streets of…Montreal, Quebec, Canada? Yep, that hotbed of the French spirit of cheese and surrender, just like all black men I’ve ever known. She did go the an HBCU, but very few black men choose to attend racially segregated institutions of higher learning, so it’s really another whiff there. 

Obama’s basic message is Kamala is black, or half black, and that should be enough for black men to vote for her. It’s the ultimate insult if you think about it. Then again, Democrats have pretty much been running with the “You’re black, and we’re Democrats, which means you have to vote for us or we’ll call you an ‘Uncle Tom’” platform for as long as I can remember why would they stop now?

That the Democrats are getting this desperate this early – everyone closes campaigns desperate – is a good sign for Republicans, but it is not a sign to take our foot off the gas. The biggest obstacle Republicans face in the election's closing weeks is complacency. Fight like you’re losing, constantly, and never let up until the other side admits it is over and they lost. Otherwise, Democrats will cheat and steal it, which they’re going to try to do. Fight like hell because that’s where the country is headed if they win. 

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Kamala?

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

Pop quiz, hotshot: You just stole the Democrats’ presidential nomination from a dementia-addled nursing home patient without receiving a single vote from the electorate and while having the lowest approval rating of any modern veep.  Despite the nonstop efforts of corporate news propagandists to anoint you as a deserving heir, Americans rightly see you as a fake, foolish, insecure, insignificant, boozy, Canadian flop who has no business being behind the wheel of an automobile, let alone taking charge of a nuclear arsenal as commander-in-chief.

Do you (a) double down on crazy and find a string of sex-talking shock jocks to interview you about important public policies; (b) flood the country with illegal aliens so that Jim Clyburn’s fraudulent mail-in-ballot operations can overwhelm legitimate voters in battleground states; (c) wait for the FBI, CIA, and NSA to do what they do best by rigging the election in your favor; or (d) hope that Hillary Clinton, Joe Scarborough, Liz Cheney, and other Democrat mouthpieces can slander Donald Trump as a “dangerous Nazi” enough times to incite another attempt on his life?  What do you do?

It’s a trick question.  You do all of the above, of course.  Then you make yourself a white wine spritzer, sit back, and call a bunch of national weather shows to give them your unsolicited drunken advice about surviving hurricanes.  Everybody knows that when hundred-mile-an-hour winds are crashing against a terrified family’s home, nothing provides more comfort than listening to an inebriated chuckler blame “climate change deniers” for the catastrophic weather while taking credit for the heroic actions of emergency search and rescue personnel.  Kamala Harris is just the phone-in phony Americans need for serious times — not!

Of all the things that could be said about Kamala Harris’s unlikely rise to the office of “President” Joe-mentia’s deputy dimwit, perhaps the most striking is that she is just so uncomfortable in her own skin.  I thought it was excruciating to listen to Hillary “Like with a cloth?” Clinton affect a Southern accent in front of certain black audiences when she was running for office (and destroying subpoenaed evidence).  With Harris, though, a different accent emerges several times a week.  Depending upon where she is and perhaps how much she’s had to drink, she twists her speech patterns into all manner of Frankensteinian phonemes loosely resembling urban slang, rural drawls, highbrow enunciation, lowbrow contraction, and even Spanish and French patois.  She’s everything and nothing all at once.

Who swaps identities as if they were silk accoutrements and regurgitates hackneyed stereotypes on demand?  Someone, I would suggest, who does not really trust her authentic self.  Someone who is so insecure that she is willing to be anyone to anybody at any time.  Whatever else such psychological flexibility reveals about Kamala Harris, hers is the exact opposite of a profile in courage.  Moreover, her linguistic pandering proves that she knows how weak, ill prepared, and unlikable she really is.  Who wants to vote for that?

I guess the human-vultures over at The View want to vote for that.  Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, and Ana Navarro look at Kween Kamala and don’t see the epitome of fake.  They see the apotheosis of presidential prestige.  I shake my head in confusion and disbelief, just as I do whenever I come across random teenage “influencers” with millions of “followers.”  How is it that The View still has an audience?  How is it that girlie man Harry Sisson is in a position to “influence” anybody?  It doesn’t bother me that they want to vote for Kamala Harris.  It bothers me that they seem to honestly believe that she is the smartest, most capable, most enlightened presidential nominee in American history.  It’s as if they want to hand her the White House and throw in a Nobel Peace Prize just for showing up.  (Didn’t we do this once already?)  

For the life of me, I cannot understand why Whoopi Goldberg would admire anyone as intellectually insipid as Kamala Harris.  How could a woman who made her living doing stand-up comedy (not an easy skill!) be impressed with a politician who struggles to string words into sentences?  You’d think entertainers capable of extemporaneous speech would take one look at Kamala sans teleprompter and conclude that she doesn’t have nearly the right stuff.  That said, I do remember when Whoopi praised Dr. Jill Biden as some kind of world-class neurosurgeon, only to discover that the first lady had acquired an Ed.D. in “educational leadership” later in life chiefly to sate her own petty desire to have a noble honorific on par with her senator husband.  So perhaps being bamboozled is Whoopi’s thing.

That does seem to be Kamala’s key demographic — people who are too dumb or too lazy to do basic research before pretending to be experts in what they are not.  I guess that’s why her #1 Fan is some former Biden groupie named Harry Sisson.  That guy’s one wheel short of a bicycle and looks as though he got his braces taken off just last week, but apparently he’s a modern “political expert” in today’s America.  There was a movie about this, wasn’t there?  Oh right — Idiocracy.

So Kam-Kam’s got the Whoopi and Sisson contingents locked down.  She’s got the fifty million foreign nationals residing in the U.S. who are forced to wittingly or unwittingly participate in the Democrats’ fraudulent mail-in-ballot schemes.  (I’m pretty sure that the only illegal aliens who get deported these days are the ones who complain to Democrat secretaries of state that someone stole their identities and unlawfully registered them as citizen-voters.)  She’s got all the young, single women who have been indoctrinated to believe that Donald Trump will somehow prevent them from choosing casual sex with strangers from Tinder over monogamous and fulfilling marriages.  She’s got women of every age who enjoy wearing knit vulvas atop their heads and killing their children up to (and sometimes after) the moment of birth.  She’s got all the gullible climate-tards who believe not only that fake “global warming” models are real (spoiler alert: every single prediction has been wrong for over one hundred years), but also that the planet can be “saved” by forcing citizens to pay a carbon tax to the government.  She’s got all the race-hustlers, LGBTQIA+ supremacists, and ideological malcontents who agree only that they all hate white people, heterosexual males, Christians, Jews, and happy families.  And last — but certainly not least — she’s got the vast, unelected, and unaccountable administrative state, whose members feed off private-sector taxpayers.  The bureaucratic blob, the Deep State, the national security surveillance state, the armies of pencil-pushing, regulation-loving cubicle kings posing as humble “public servants” — call them Legion — these are Kamala Harris’s real constituents.  She answers to the government Leviathan that answers to no one else.  These are her people.

Is it enough?  Can she mix together ignorance, arrogance, sexual angst, racial animosity, militant feminism, beta-male subservience, mass censorship, fraudulent votes from non-citizen residents, mail-in ballots from foreign NGOs, youthful hubris, naïveté, bureaucratic authoritarianism, privilege hiding behind victimhood, religious-like devotion to dogmatic belief disguised as scientific expertise, and a fascination with global government that is merely a modern rendering of Marxist-fascist totalitarianism from last century?  Can she take all this filth, add in huge dollops of “joy” and “vibes,” and somehow create something appetizing enough for victory?

I really don’t think so.  Even with all the inevitable ballot fraud that will disenfranchise citizens in so many states, the Harris/Walz stew just stinks.  Kamala’s got a problem with no viable electoral answer.  In the end, you can’t fix fake.

🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

 

Welcome to 

The 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓 

Here’s a place to share cartoons, jokes, music, art, nature, 

man-made wonders, and whatever else you can think of. 

No politics or divisive posts on this thread. 

This feature will appear every day at 1pm mountain time. 

Joe's 2024 Exit Results in Hunter Biden's 'Art' to Face Value Plunge

Sarah Arnold reporting for Townhall 

Now that President Joe Biden’s political career is officially over, Hunter Biden must find a new way to profit himself, given that his family can no longer peddle money from shady foreign businesses and his so-called “art” deals. 

According to experts in the art industry, Hunter Biden’s art career is a thing of the past. Now that the president’s time in the District of Corruption is over, so is his son’s shady art business. 

“His father is no longer relevant in the maelstrom, which is politics,” Charlie Horne, president of Gurr Johns, an art valuation and advisory firm, told the outlet. He predicted that over time, Hunter Biden’s art market will be “wash[ed] away.” 

“His cachet will be short-lived. I don’t think he’s ever gotten real traction,” he continued. 

Critics say Hunter Biden’s short-lived art “career” was boosted solely by his father’s influence in Washington—and that may be true because only ten people bought his paintings for $1.5 million. 

Last year, the GOP-controlled House Oversight and Accountability Committee investigated the Biden family to learn more about the anonymous individuals who purchased Hunter Biden's "art" at exorbitant prices. Some of his paintings, which look like a third-grader spilled paint on a canvas, were reportedly worth between $75,000 and $500,000— sold through Georges Bergès Gallery. However, there has been a lack of transparency about who is buying his pieces. 

Chairwoman of art market studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Natasha Degen, pointed out that the value that Hunter Biden’s art sold does not match the value of the work itself. 

The Biden family has a history of using their family name for financial or political gain, and Hunter’s art dealings were no exception. Perhaps the first son sold his paintings at an inflated price so that buyers could have access to then-Vice President Biden or meetings in the Oval Office. 

At one point, Hunter Biden claimed art would be his full-time career. However, now that he has been convicted of gun crimes, he has more to worry about than whether he will use red or yellow paint to blow through a straw and onto a piece of paper and call it “art.” 

Lexophile

 

I thought mayhaps we may wish to add some of the terms to our vocabulary. Enjoy!

ENGLISH Mensa Invitational – for lexophiles

11 October 2024 

AuntiE

The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time. 
2. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole. 
3. Intaxicaton: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with. 
4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly. 
5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future. 
6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid. 
7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high. 
8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it. 
9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late. 
10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit) 
11. Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer. 
12. Decafalon(n):The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you. 
13. Glibido: All talk and no action. 
14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly. 
15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web. 
16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out. 
17. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating. 

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. 

And the winners are: 
1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs. 
2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained. 
3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach. 
4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk. 
5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent. 
6. Negligent, adj. Absent mindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown. 
7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp. 
8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash. 
9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller. 
10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline. 
11. Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam. 
12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists. 
13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist. 
14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms. 
15. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there. 

Fake Crowds, Fake Ads, Real Ridicule: A Week of Failures for Harris-Walz

 What we are witnessing is the panicked flailing of a campaign that is desperately attempting to recoup its lost initiative. The result is partly embarrassing, partly hilarious.

If I may start with an understatement:  It has not been a good week for team Kamala Harris.  First, there was the scandal of her interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes.  Asked about US influence on Israel, Harris delivered one of her signature, zero-calorie word salads. We know this because the network released a preview of the interview on social media, where it was promptly pounced upon and mocked.  But when the entire interview aired, the interview was edited so that Harris’s original answer was replaced by a brief answer lifted from another part of the interview.

That bit of techno-fraud was instantly pilloried and deposited a lot of unsightly egg on the corporate face of CBS. I have not seen anything resembling an apology or even an acknowledgment from the network.  As of this writing, calls for an unedited transcript of the whole interview to be released have gone unanswered. As the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway wrote, CBS’s refusal is “a huge scandal” that, among other things, “suggests that much of the entire finished product was manipulative and deceitful, and not just the one horrible example that was discovered.”

Bad though the episode is for CBS, it is also humiliating for Harris. As Macbeth noted in another context, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.”  The 60 Minutes débâcle was only the advance guard assaulting team Harris last week. Then there was a disastrous “town hall” meeting in which, again, multiple humiliations were assembled. First, some attentive scribe noticed that Harris was reading her replies off a teleprompter. Remember that was supposed to be an open forum in which Harris could connect with voters personally.  But here she was, repeating scripted replies to pre-formulated questions.

And that was not the worst of it.  A little digging revealed that the audience, too, was scripted.  As one commentator noted, “Kamala Harris’s disastrous Univision town hall featured a ‘fake’ audience. 50% of the attendees were handpicked from across the country and flown to the town hall and were allowed to ask questions. The other 50% of the attendees were hired by an ‘audience-for-hire’ company and weren’t allowed to ask questions. The event was completely stage-directed and fake.”

An “audience-for-hire company”?  Yep.  I am not sure exactly which company team Harris employed, but it turns out that such initiatives are a booming business. Consider, for example, the company Crowds on Demand. Their website advertises “PROTESTS • RALLIES • ADVOCACY” and goes on to boast that

Whether your organization is lobbying to gain approval of a project, move forward a legislative initiative, bring additional pressure within complex litigation or trying to see swift and effective action in another way, we can set-up protests, rallies, demonstrations, alternatives to litigation or business disputes, coordinate phone-banking initiatives and even create non-profit organizations to advance your agenda.

I suspect that Democrats have frequent recourse to such companies.  The Harris campaign, at any rate, is nearly 100% synthetic.  Its crowds are actors or activists for hire.  Ditto the figures populating its ads.  In what has been derided as the “cringiest political ad ever,” a Harris satellite, attempting to address the campaign’s masculinity deficit, just released the truly horrible “I’m-a-man-and-I’m-voting-for-Harris” ad.

Like many people, I at first thought it was a spoof, an anti-Harris production designed to make fun of her and her running mate, Tim Walz. That certainly was the effect.  But it turns out that the half dozen men in the ad were not random XY creatures who just happened to support Harris for president.  No, they were B-list actors, recruited and paid to deliver their lines.  (And what lines they were. One actor who pretended to know something about cars, said “You think I’m afraid to rebuild a carburetor? I eat carburetors for breakfast.” I am thinking of offering a reward to anyone who can tell me what that means.)

One enterprising commentator discovered who wrote the ad—Jacob Reed, a writer for the late-night talk host Jimmy Kimmel—and the real-life biographies of the actors. Let’s just say that none is a poster child for masculinity.  The comments have been brutal.  “Zero testosterone was used in the making of this ad”;  “A Real Man instantly realizes that there isn’t a single Real Man in this pathetic beta male cringe-fest of a propaganda video”; “From the party that can’t tell you what a woman is”; “As a man, I think I walked away from this ad with a yeast infection.”

The world was still ridiculing the ad when the news came that Tim Walz, in another effort to assuage the doubts about his masculinity, had invited journalists on a pheasant hunt. A bunch of photographs of the “hunt” are circulating.  You’ll see lots of outdoorsy garb and a few dogs.  What you won’t see are any shotguns.  In a real hunting party, every hunter would have a couple of shotguns to hand.  But in the fake, synthetic world of Harris-Walz, no guns were thought necessary.  As someone quipped, perhaps they were planning to catch the pheasants by hand and strangle them. Eventually, Walz was given a gun, but it was painfully clear that he had no idea how to handle it.  As one commentator noted, Walz’s “gun handling skills make Dick Cheney look like the safest shooter in the world. Perhaps that is why Cheney endorsed him.”

All this happened in a matter of days, and the days in question are barely three weeks from the election.  What we are witnessing is the panicked flailing of a campaign that is desperately attempting to recoup its lost initiative. The result is partly embarrassing, partly hilarious.  Strange things can happen in the last days of a presidential campaign. Sudden reversals of fortune are not unknown.  Candidates can suddenly turn things around and emerge victorious after weeks or months of trailing in the polls.  The most difficult obstacle to victory, however, is being made to appear ridiculous.  That is almost inevitably fatal.  Harris and Walz have made themselves ridiculous time and again this last week or two.  I do not believe they can recover.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/13/fake-crowds-fake-ads-real-ridicule-a-week-of-failures-for-harris-walz/