Monday, October 21, 2024

Beginning of the end of the Obama-Biden Democratic Party


Harris and Walz have made a thing of “turning the page,” but the page that must be turned is the one they are on.

In recent years, beginning with Obama, the Democratic party has become unmoored from its basic center-left policies and embraced ideas and policies that are illogical, absurd, and increasingly unpopular. Things like these:

  • Allowing open borders coupled with a very generous social welfare system to be tapped by all who enter; 
  • Endorsing chemical castration of children and allowing transgender women into the private spaces of actual women;
  • Engaging in endless wars in which we have no genuine national stake; 
  • Supporting UNWRA, which exists solely to attack our longtime ally Israel;
  • Issuing regulations that limit productivity in everything in the name of preventing the chimerical and unproven climate change;
  • Fighting all efforts to make national elections auditable; 
  • Ignoring the violence on college campuses;
  • Committing significant First Amendment violations and pursuing frivolous lawsuits against their opponents;
  • Defunding the police and allowing crime to flourish in blue cities;
  • Embracing corrupt dictatorial international bodies like WHO and WEF;
  • Promoting DEI policies that are discriminatory and result in ethnic and racial identity, rather than merit, being the criteria for hiring and promoting employees.

Looking at some tea leaves, I see the beginning of the end of this party as presently constituted. It will soon have to refashion itself, jettison its most outrageous members and their notions, or be replaced by another new party altogether.

The map reader (Harris) and the genius military strategist (Biden)

The elimination of Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas, in Rafah this week exposed once again the moronic foreign policies of the Harris-Biden team. Both hailed it, and Harris, with outrageous chutzpah, claimed credit for it, though the administration is surely responsible for this having taken longer than it should have.  

As late as March of this year, Harris was still working to keep Hamas intact:

“I have studied the maps… It would be a huge mistake for Israel to go into Rafah.”

For months, the Administration warned Israel not to go into Rafah.

In mid-March, US officials told the Politico news site that US President Joe Biden would consider limiting future military aid to Israel if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved ahead with an offensive against Hamas in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah…

Vice President Kamala Harris famously said at the time that she had “studied the maps” and that an operation was not viable, while warning of potential consequences…

The intense global pressure led to months of delay, but the Rafah offensive eventually went ahead in May regardless, with Israel successfully evacuating the civilian population ahead of its push into the city…

In fact, shortly before Sinwar was killed in a firefight, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu threatening an arms embargo unless it met the Administration’s absurd demands respecting Gaza. Now Harris says, “Justice has been served, and the United States, Israel, and the entire world are better off as a result.” Now Biden says, “This is a good day for Israel, the United States and the world.”

National security adviser Jacob Sullivan even asserts that U.S. intelligence had helped Israel locate Sinwar. (If they knew where he was, why did they fight so hard to keep Israel away from a man they concede is a U.S. enemy?) 

Biden argued that going into Rafah would extend the fighting forever. The Israelis finally ignored these threats, and some recruits spotted Sinwar, who, after murdering the six hostages he had kept with him underground as insurance, scampered out of a tunnel, and they eliminated him. Saturday, there were scenes of hundreds of Gazans leaving Rafah for sheltered areas in the north or surrendering. The cesspool that the Administration prevented from being sanitized will now surely be cleaned out rapidly.

It’s hard not to be contemptuous of those who promulgated and endorsed the Biden-Harris nitwit strategy and now try to pretend they are happy that Israel’s ignoring them did the trick.

Secretary Blinken: “Yahya Sinwar was responsible for the murder of thousands of Israelis, Americans, and citizens of more than 30 countries. His decision to launch the terror attacks on October 7 unleashed catastrophic consequences on the people of Gaza. The world is a better place with him gone.”

 Tea Leaves

In the early 1980s, I worked for the Department of Justice, making several trips to the USSR, and to me it was clear the place was crumbling. It’s in small details that the bigger picture often becomes clear. For example, how in the USSR, censorship crippled their economy. The desire to keep a lid on free expression, for example, meant that computers and typewriters were kept under strict state controls, and even photocopies had to be recorded by subject and number of pages and approved by bureaucrats up the line. Yes, it meant unapproved writers and opinions had to go through hoops to hand copy and distribute views contrary to the state’s. No modern state, however, could survive and thrive this way, was my view. Here's how I’m reading the tea leaves about the Democratic party as presently staffed and their policies.

Senate Races

Absent enormous voting cheating of the sort we saw in 2020, I think Donald Trump will win. For the first time in decades, more voters have registered as Republicans than Democrats. Then look at what’s happening in four swing states:

Ads have been released that show four Democratic Senate candidates in battleground states either working with former President Donald Trump or agreeing with his messaging as the November election is less than a month away.

Campaign ads for Rep. Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, and Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin focus on the Democratic candidates' alliance with Trump or his policies, implying that aligning with the former president may benefit their campaigns more than siding with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

While Trump is behind Harris by 1.4 points according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, he leads the vice president in every battleground state.

Then there’s the Al Smith Catholic Charity dinner.

This is a major event every four years where the candidates roast each other at a dinner, the proceeds of which go to support charities. From its inception until this year, only Walter Mondale skipped it. Kamala Harris skipped it this year, submitting instead a video with an actress who is openly anti-Catholic and which was so insulting to the Catholic Church that in his closing benediction, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan omitted mention of her.

Trump, who chatted and joked amiably with longtime foe Chuck Schumer, was greeted by another foe, Governor Kathy Hochul, and prosecutor Letitia James, whose case against him is in the process of being thrown out on appeal, was in the audience looking less than overly confident. 

Trump got in a number of zingers, but this one, according to videos I watched, seemed to have brought down the house:

 "The Democrats have been telling us Trump's reelection is a threat to democracy. In fact, they were so concerned of this threat, they staged a coup, ousted their democratically elected incumbent, and installed Kamala Harris. 

"Sometimes [all her] prayers take 3.5 years and a George Clooney op-ed."

They all know, and so do we. The effort to save the day by dumping Biden, installing Harris, and keeping the same idiotic policies and advisers has failed. Time to turn the page back to Trump.



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X22, Christian Patriot News, and more- Oct 21

 




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Two Weeks To Victory, Probably


We’re about two weeks out from what may be the most important election of our lifetime. It always seems to be the most important election of our lifetime, which is a real problem. Frankly, elections shouldn’t be that big a deal. They should be important. They should matter. But they should not be an existential crisis. Look back to 1996 when you had Bill Clinton running for reelection against legit war hero Bob Dole. We had that election, and nothing much changed. But pretty much ever since, it’s been crisis after crisis. It’s always the most important election because the left wants to lead America into a communist nightmare and probably a second Civil War.

So, this is serious. And if you’re serious, you have voted already, and if you have not, let me stop right here and tell you to get off your butt and go vote if you’re in one of those jurisdictions where you can. I voted. I wrote a columnabout voting. Vote right now. Don’t wait. Don’t risk an Election Day calamity keeping you from voting. Do it now. Bank your vote. Get it done.

Back to this column.

Understanding that this is serious, America is on pins and needles. The Democrats are pretending to believe their lies. They’re pretending that if Donald Trump wins, he will censor the news and social media, and use the military to oppress his enemies while waging lawfare upon them. This, of course, is the Democrat agenda. They will continue to do and accelerate all those things given the opportunity. They don’t have a platform. They just have projection.

It’s nice to know that, should he win, Trump will probably be less likely to embrace establishment traitors than he was the first time. He now has no illusions about the enemy, especially after they tried to frame him so they could lock him in prison for the rest of his life. Hopefully, he will wreak an unholy vengeance upon them. Time to cull their herd. There are a lot of bad people in government and outside as well, and it’s time for an accounting. A bunch need to be fired. Some need to go to jail. Others need to be hunted for sport. Some softcons will plead that Trump should forgo his righteous retribution and respect the norms, but it is unclear why he should respect the norms that existed 25 years ago as opposed to the norms that exist (or, rather, no longer exist) today. That’s the thing about the New Rules. For better or worse, they are the rules. Should Trump win, I am going to enjoy spending four years telling our enemies that I told them so.

It seems like Trump is going to win. That’s looking more likely every day that Kamala goes out and tosses a word salad, or insults Christians, or is baffled by questions about what she would do differently than our current alleged President. Her serial gaffe-making has turned Brat Summer into Splat Fall. 

You can smell their panic. Kamala is frazzled. She’s not acting like someone who has nailed down the independents. She should be pivoting to mobilizing her base now. She should be in the “get out the vote” phase. But she’s still in the “Trying to talk people into voting for her” phase. Here, Trump has an advantage. Everybody knows who Trump is.

Moreover, everybody knows how good the early part of Trump’s first term was. Democrat attempts to push back on that are kind of hilarious. You have Barack Obama claiming that the good stuff about Trump’s economy was all him – it just manifested after eight years, and he was out of office running around with his rich friends. But you also have Kamala telling us how Trump’s reign was so terrible that during the last four years, they haven’t been able to fix it. So, basically, Trump stole Obama’s glory, and also, there was no glory. I’m not sure how that works, but they’re giving it a shot. And I think they’re missing.

This has been a campaign about vibes, which are definitely vibing to Trump. Kamala got a two-month tongue bath from the regime media, but she grates on people. The Kamala Effect is especially pronounced in young men. Remember, these guys have spent their whole lives being hassled by mediocre women like Kamala Harris. These tiresome crones are incompetent, dumb, aggressively leftist, and utterly contemptuous of males and male energy. Still, they have run every institution that these young men have ever been a part of. These young men are going to come out to vote for Trump not because they’re sexist but because she hates them and Trump doesn’t.

We are now where I thought we would be in this race – at least when Biden punched out in July. We are not where I thought we would be a year ago. I thought Trump had a ceiling. I didn’t count on dementia and this blithering broad being so offensive to normal people that even some who didn’t like Donald Trump would embrace him. Harris bizarrely makes a huge deal out of turncoats like Dick and Liz Cheney and points to collaborators like Adam Kinzinger and the rest of the cast of “The Loathed Boat” as if they represent some sort of meaningful contingent of voters who are going to swing the election her way. In fact, the key voters are the ones who didn’t like Donald Trump before, largely because of his legendary trumpiness. Trump himself has gotten serious and restrained his worst impulses, and he’s hired a super-competent campaign team that has been running a fantastic operation. These have helped, but what really did it was Kamala Harris’s all-encompassing awfulness has driven people who once swore they would never vote for Donald Trump deep into MAGAland. That’s the cost of wanting to dump the Electoral College, pack the Supreme Court, take our guns, castrate our kids, and leave the Israelis defenseless in the face of the semi-human hordes trying to murder them.

Yeah, this is an important election, and the people who have come to Trump after rejecting Trump have demonstrated a seriousness of purpose and patriotism that we need to celebrate. Those who abandoned the Republican Party, mostly because we rejected them over their lengthy track record of failure, are scum who put their personal envy of Trump over their country. You can’t despise them enough.

And while it looks like we’re going to win, this is the time when we are actually most vulnerable. We’re not vulnerable to Kamala – she’s too dumb to generate an October surprise, and there’s no key event coming up that will allow her to change the trajectory of this race. The risk is complacency. The risk is our people saying, “Hey, we got this; I don’t need to vote, much less get my family, friends, and neighbors to vote.” That’s how we can still lose.

So go vote. Do it now.




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Where Trump and Harris Stand on China Policies

 Both candidates agree the Chinese Communist Party poses a threat to the United States, but they have different strategies on how to address it.

The next president will likely preside over one of the most consequential periods in the nation’s relations with communist China, an adversary that has the intention and capacity to displace the current U.S.-led world order.
Eight in 10 Americans view China unfavorably, according to a Pew Research Center report released in July.
Washington also has arrived at a consensus that the Chinese regime poses a threat as it closes the gap with the United States in the military, diplomatic, and technological domains.

The current approach to China began with former President Donald Trump. Identifying China as a “strategic competitor,” the Trump administration took a new approach to U.S.–China relations. It imposed broad tariffs on Chinese goods, controlled Chinese access to American semiconductor technology, and pivoted national security strategy from the Middle East to China and Russia.

The Biden administration continued many of these policies, and Washington’s China policy will likely continue to be hawkish. However, the two presidential candidates would likely pursue distinct approaches owing to their differing worldviews and depending on who they appoint to key positions.

Former President Donald Trump is broadly expected to resume the China policies he initiated in his first term.

Vice President Kamala Harris has indicated no sign of divergence from the Biden administration’s China policies.

Trade

The two candidates agree on controlling strategic goods and technologies, investing in innovation, reshoring supply chains, and combating Beijing’s unfair trade practices.
The aim is to ensure that “America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century,” Harris has said repeatedly.
Last month, the Biden administration finalized its tariffs, retaining all Trump-era rates and sharply increasing them on selected critical technologies and minerals.
During a speech on the economy in Pittsburgh on Sept. 25, the vice president vowed, “I will never hesitate to take swift and strong measures when China undermines the rules of the road at the expense of our workers, our communities, and our companies.”
The Trump-centered Republican platform also pledges to revoke China’s permanent normal trade relations status, which grants it free trade benefits with the United States; phase out imports of essential goods that include electronics, steel, and pharmaceuticals; and stop China from buying American real estate and industries.
Trump hinted at reigniting the trade war, suggesting that he may impose tariffs of more than 60 percent on Chinese goods.
Dennis Wilder, a former national security and intelligence officer who held several senior roles in the Bush and Obama administrations, believes that Trump’s threat of higher tariffs is merely a negotiating tool to achieve a trade deal similar to the Phase One U.S.–China trade deal signed in 2020.
Stephen Ezell, a vice president at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation think tank, believes that Trump will take the pledges in the Republican platform seriously, particularly the pledge to revoke China’s permanent normal trade relations status, because Beijing has failed to comply with its commitments as a member of the World Trade Organization, he told The Epoch Times.
Beijing did not fulfill its pledge in the Phase One deal to buy an additional $200 billion in U.S. products over two years. During a meeting with farmers in Smithton, Pennsylvania, a borough near Pittsburgh, on Sept. 23, Trump said that if reelected, his first call would be to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, asking him to honor the deal.

During the final months of his term, Trump raised the idea of separating the United States and Chinese economies, known as decoupling. His former trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, a rumored candidate for the next secretary of the treasury, advocates for the same approach.

Harris and her Democratic Party have a different view; she believes in “derisking,” not decoupling.

James Lewis, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said decoupling is already happening.

As to whether a future Harris administration would differ in its policies from President Joe Biden’s approach, Lewis told The Epoch Times that he would watch the pace of decoupling and the measures adopted to reinforce it.

Security

Despite a growing consensus in Washington on the need to counter the Chinese regime’s aggressive actions, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, differences remain on how to avoid military conflict.

Trump emphasizes maintaining peace by showing military strength. During his term, he focused on modernizing nuclear weapons and halted the trend of making cuts to the U.S. nuclear stockpile.

A 2018 nuclear policy document listed one of the roles of nuclear weapons as “hedging against an uncertain future.” The Biden administration dropped this language in its 2022 update.
Biden’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review also canceled the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile program for cost reasons. However, Congress continued funding the program, although it was not included in the Biden administration’s defense budget requests. According to its proponents, the program enhances the credibility of U.S. deterrence.
A YouGov survey in June found that Trump supporters are more likely than Biden supporters to say the United States is safer because of its nuclear arsenal.

During a debate on the defense funding bill in 2020, then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) supported cutting the budget.

“I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget and redirecting funding to communities in need,” she said at the time.

In May, Harris said U.S. air and space supremacy is essential to ensuring global peace and security and that the Biden administration has kept defense spending steady.

Trump started the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, which Biden continued. Both parties agree that the Indo-Pacific region is the United States’s primary theater. However, Trump and Harris may differ on the balance between the imminent dangers in the Russia–Ukraine and Israel–Hamas regional wars and the tense South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.

Ivan Kanapathy, a senior vice president at advisory firm Beacon Global Strategies and former senior national security official under the Trump administration, believes the European Union, which has a much larger economy than Russia, should handle the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war while the United States should focus more on China and North Korea.

Elbridge Colby, a former senior Pentagon official and a top contender for the national security adviser position in Trump’s second term, shares this view.
In late September, Harris reaffirmed U.S. support for Ukraine as a way of “fulfilling our long-standing role of global leadership.” Earlier this year, in February, she touted having “invested heavily in our alliances and partnerships and created new ones to ensure peace and security” in the Indo-Pacific during the past 3 1/2 years.

The Biden administration has maintained that the Indo-Pacific is the “priority theater” for the United States. However, military assistance to Ukraine and Israel has strained the defense department and led to an arms sales backlog to Taiwan of about $20 billion, equivalent to the island’s annual defense budget.

Biden has said several times that the United States would defend Taiwan if Beijing tried to annex the island by force. However, his officials walked back those statements each time, saying U.S. policy is deliberately vague on what it would do.

In September 2022, Harris said that the United States would “continue to oppose any unilateral change to the status quo” and “continue to support Taiwan’s self-defense, consistent with our long-standing policy.”
Trump has recently sparked controversy by saying Taiwan should pay the United States for its defense.

Trump is also credited with forging closer U.S.–Taiwan relations, starting with his unprecedented phone conversation in 2016—the first such official call since 1960—with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who congratulated the U.S. president-elect.

Trump signed into law the Taiwan Travel Act in 2018, which encouraged engagements between U.S. and Taiwan officials at all levels, and the Taiwan Assurance Act in 2020, which ensured alignment of Taiwan guidelines in the State Department. During his term, several current U.S. cabinet-level officials visited the island nation.

In Smithton, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 23, Trump alluded to the possibility of getting into a war with China while speaking about protecting the U.S. steel industry.

“If we’re in a war—and we need army tanks, and we need ships, and we need other things that happen to be made of steel—what are we going to do? Go to China and get the steel?” he said.

“We’re fighting China, but ‘Would you mind selling us some steel?’ Think about it.”

According to the 2024 edition of the Lowy Institute’s Asia Power Index—which ranks 27 states’ powers based on eight metrics, including military and economic capabilities—China’s power is plateauing at a level below that of the United States. However, for the first time since the index began in 2018, experts surveyed judged that China is better able to deploy rapidly and for a sustained period in the event of a conflict in Asia.

Fentanyl

Another sticky China-related issue is fentanyl overdose, the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45. The United States has lost half a million people to the drug in the past decade. A vast majority of the chemicals or precursors needed for fentanyl production are shipped from China to Mexico, processed, and then smuggled into the United States.
In January, the Biden administration relaunched a U.S.–China counternarcotics cooperation program. According to a U.S. State Department spokesperson, Chinese authorities arrested one individual earlier this year in relation to U.S. charges brought in 2023. That remains the only known arrest made by Beijing as a result of its bilateral counternarcotics coordination with the United States.

On Sept. 1, China placed an additional seven fentanyl precursors under state control, which triggers limitations on purchases, sales, and exports.

Calling the drug a “scourge on our country,” Harris pledged last month, without mentioning China, “As president, I will make it a top priority to disrupt the flow of fentanyl into the United States.”

In Smithton, Trump said that if he were reelected, he would call Xi and ask the CCP leader to give death penalties to Chinese fentanyl dealers. According to Trump, while he was in office, he had a “handshake deal” with Xi on that issue.

Xi had previously promised Trump to rein in Chinese fentanyl traffickers and added more than 1,400 known fentanyl variations to the list of narcotics under Chinese state control in May 2019. However, the Trump administration saw no large-scale Chinese law enforcement actions to reinforce the regulation.

Engagement

While U.S.–China relations were more confrontational under Trump, the Democratic platform shows more willingness to engage with Beijing, advocating for a “tough but smart” approach to China.
Harris shares Biden’s view of “responsibly managing this competition” via “high-level, open lines of communication” to avoid conflict or confrontations, according to national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Alexander Gray, CEO of American Global Strategies and a former senior national security official under the Trump administration, said dialogue and discussions need to have an objective.

He told The Epoch Times that the CCP has “a well-known historical reputation for manipulating foreign interlocutors and using those types of engagements for propaganda purposes rather than having any agenda that’s constructive.”

According to Kanapathy, Biden cautiously continued his predecessor’s China policy for two years before his administration shifted to “a more accommodative posture with less emphasis on competitive actions.”

Lewis, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, believes the current administration’s approach hinges upon an assessment of whether China has peaked. If it is believed that China has plateaued, he said, then U.S. policy responses can be more relaxed. If it is thought that China will continue getting stronger, then more pushback is needed, he said.

But this question is still under open debate and has resulted in a “sort of gridlock in the White House under Biden on China’s strategy,” according to Lewis.

China is facing a number of problems, including an aging and declining population, spiraling debt, shrinking foreign direct investment, and an exodus of the rich.

Lewis also pointed to the consensus that Chinese officials “fudge their numbers,” saying the pace of China’s economic growth is likely half of what Beijing claims it is.

However, he said the problems might be offset by Beijing’s “willingness to spend” and its deep research bench.

China has more than 6 million personnel to support Xi’s plan to develop new technology—such as batteries and solar energy—to achieve world dominance.

Human Rights

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have been vocal critics of human rights abuses in China.
In 2020, Harris told the Council on Foreign Relations that China’s “abysmal human rights record” must be prominently featured in U.S. policy toward the country.
As a senator, Harris cosponsored the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 and the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, which sanctioned individuals responsible for human rights violations in Hong Kong and China’s Xinjiang region.

Trump signed both bills into law.

While facing criticism for publicly praising Xi, Trump has also presided over several milestones in terms of opposing the Chinese regime’s human rights abuses.

On its last day, the Trump administration declared that the Chinese regime had committed ongoing “genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.”

Several legislatures worldwide have backed such a determination with nonbinding votes, but Washington remains the only executive branch to do so.

Trump was also the first U.S. president to meet with a Falun Gong practitioner, along with other survivors of religious persecution from China and elsewhere. His administration sanctioned those involved in “gross violations of human rights” by being “associated with particularly severe violations of religious freedom of Falun Gong practitioners.”

The CCP perceives Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa—a spiritual practice that follows the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance—as one of the top threats to its rule, along with Taiwanese independence, Tibetan independence, Xinjiang “separatists,” and the Chinese democracy movement.

The Biden administration has continued the policy of opposing the regime’s oppression of Falun Gong members, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken imposing visa restrictions on another Chinese communist official for “arbitrary detention of Falun Gong practitioners for their spiritual beliefs.”


https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/where-trump-and-harris-stand-on-china-policies-5714211?utm_source=China_article_paid&src_src=China_article_paid&utm_campaign=China-2024-10-17-ca&src_cmp=China-2024-10-17-ca&utm_medium=email&est=WJnE27AN5BDLtlvfBXnxfDW%2FxKyyZntLr%2FRcQNXfmh4tkYntEjeUJDZMXFRsOtESdI5s&utm_term=news4&utm_content=4

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