By CHRISTOPHER MANION
A couple of months ago, Antony Blinken, Joe Biden’s secretary of state, told Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, that Washington was prepared to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.”
Last week, Lloyd Austin, Biden’s defense secretary, said that “we are prepared to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” and announced that more “critical security and defense” aid would be sent to the country.
And of course, Joe Biden often joins in, assuring Volodymyr Zelensky that he will support Ukraine “as long as it takes.”
Since U.S. aid to Ukraine has been going on for some time now, one wonders, to paraphrase Bill Clinton – don’t we get to find out “what the meaning of the word ‘it’ is” before we pledge our eternal devotion (as well as our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor) to it?
Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump’s secretary of state, chimes in: “It’s in our core interest to help Ukraine end this war by defeating Putin. Here’s why every American benefits from a Ukrainian victory,” he wrote last week, listing his prognostications.
History departments are closing down on university campuses throughout the country, so it’s no surprise that nobody seems to care about history anymore either.
So, I wrote Mr. Pompeo, a strong pro-lifer from his days representing Kansas’ Fourth District in the U.S. Congress.
I remind him of Lyndon Johnson’s Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. Clifford had chaired Johnson’s Intelligence Advisory Board in the mid-1960s before becoming his secretary of state in 1967.
According to reports at the time, Johnson asked Clifford in one tense conversation about the U.S. prospects of achieving “victory” in Viet Nam.
“Mr. President,” Clifford responded, “it depends on what you mean by ‘victory’.”
“Words, words, words.”
You don’t have to be Hamlet to know that words matter. But here we see Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and now Joe Biden, all using words that can mean whatever they want them to mean.
Well, so did Big Brother.
In the Ministry of Truth, 1984’s version of today’s State Media, the Memory Hole wasn’t the Party’s only method of rewriting history daily. Vocabulary also played a crucial role.
Party member Winston would often converse with his colleague Syme, a philologist, at lunch. They occasionally chatted about Syme’s pet project: working on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.
Syme talked too much. He was vaporized. But he knew that words were no longer symbols referring to reality, they were tools of power — and the powerful could use them to mean whatever they wanted them to mean.
Orwell knew his Lewis Carroll. “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”
Enter Master Blinken
On Wednesday, our old friend Dan Oliver, a stalwart in the conservative movement for nearly half a century, offered some thoughts on what “it” really means to Antony Blinken. It goes back to the days preceding the election of November 2020.
When The New York Post revealed the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 20202, Blinken, a Biden campaign senior adviser at the time, “organized a lying fest in which he got 50 national security types to state in writing that the Hunter Biden laptop (which had been in the FBI’s possession for more than a year) was a Russian disinformation operation,” Oliver writes.
“We know it was not. What it was, was an Antony Blinken disinformation operation. Then, as we learned from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, the FBI piled on, warning media outlets that the impending dump of anti-Biden information gleaned from the laptop was probably a Russian plot. That’s why you heard almost nothing about it from the mainstream press during the election.”
“We digress to ask why any foreign government should believe anything Blinken says? He has no credibility — which, one could say (and should) makes him the perfect secretary of state for the Biden administration,” Oliver concludes.
Why would anybody trust Antony Blinken at all?
Who cares? He had pulled off a masterful Newspeak maneuver: In 2016, the Ministry of Truth minted “Russia” as an ideological symbol of evil incarnate, a bludgeon to be used as a convenient label for everything Trump. The symbol’s contents were regularly recharged with new “truths,” the most recent of which was the “Putin Stooge” epithet designed to silence those who questioned the prudence, or even the constitutionality, of Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine.
In 2022, Biden had used the war to distract the country from his endless disasters. “MAGA Republicans” and “Russia,” repeated endlessly in his rant a year ago in Philadelphia’s Constitution Hall, became the mantras of State Media. They resonated through the November elections, and Republicans, who were expected to gain dozens of House seats, won only a handful.
So, it worked!
And when we ask Blinken — or Austin, or even Joe — “what the meaning of ‘it’ is,” of course they won’t tell us. But we already know.
Per Lenin and Humpty Dumpty, “it” means “whatever furthers the revolution.”
“Fly Free With DoD” —
But There’s A Hitch
We reported last March that the Department of Defense had instituted a new policy regarding female service members seeking an abortion. At the time, a spokesman said that the “free abortion vacations” policy was required to “maintain force readiness and unit cohesion.”
According to the policy, servicewomen and their families who live in states where abortion is illegal will be given 21 days of leave for abortions and be reimbursed for travel expenses to “access non-covered reproductive health care.”
In March, Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville put a “hold” on all military promotions to protest of the Pentagon’s new policy.
A “hold” on a particular Senate vote is an informal but powerful instrument, a warning that, should the body move to debate and vote on the matter, the Member will filibuster the motion to proceed — effectively shutting down Senate business.
After weeks of criticism, John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, defended the policy publicly two weeks ago.
“One in five members of the military are women,” Kirby began.
Curiously, he did not define “what a woman is.”
But I digress.
“And when you sign up, you have every right to expect that . . . the military is going to take care of you,” he continued.
“And they’re going to take care of your families. And they’re going to make sure that you can serve with dignity and respect no matter who you are, who you love, or, or how you worship or don’t, and, and our policies, whether they’re diversity, inclusion, equity, or whether they’re about transgender individuals who qualify, physically and mentally deserve to be able to do it with dignity, or whether it’s about female service members, one in five, or female family members being able to count on the kinds of health care and reproductive care specifically that they need to serve.”
Dignity indeed.
It’s a fact that our country’s military recruiting is at a historic low precisely because of the policies Kirby is so proud of — but he insists that without the “Free Abortion Vacation” policy, it would be even worse.
Meanwhile, without consulting Congress, Biden promises Ukraine membership in NATO, inviting a direct U.S. military confrontation with Russia, while he depletes military supplies on U.S. strategic oil reserves that will take years — and hundreds of billions — to rebuild.
Xi Jinping knows that Joe is a “paper tiger,” in Mao’s famous phrase, and Communist China’s powerful “Dear Leader” patiently waits for the right moment to retake Taiwan.
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