Biden, Bombs, And Bombast

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

“Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages” (Samuel Johnson, The Idler, 1758).

• + + In response to Vladimir Putin’s mention of Russia’s nuclear weapons, Joe Biden responded not with statesmanship, but political bluster. “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” he told high-dollar Democrat donors in Manhattan last week.
  The Biden administration’s foreign policy (if it has one at all) has been chaotic and incoherent. It has failed to address, much less confront, the threat of America’s most dangerous enemy, Communist China. Beijing has paid no price for unleashing the Wuhan Virus on the world — in fact, the Biden Junta has ordered our government’s bureaucracies — case in point: Fauci’s Center for Disease Control — to cavil and mislead, while upping the fog factor to ten out of ten, regarding that crime against humanity.
  As a result, Americans have been twice victimized: by the ChiComs, and by our own Establishment.
  The elites — the State Media, the “experts,” the academy, and the scions of Capitol Hill — concur. “China!!!” is not in their vocabulary.
  No, as a thousand gnomes in Biden’s bureaucracies grimly labor to bring America to its knees, “Russia!!!” serves as the Left’s distraction of choice.
  To wit: Vladimir Putin is responsible for all the disasters that Joe Biden has wrought here at home.
  To make that dubious sale, Biden has relied on the Usual Suspects to resuscitate the “Russia! Russia!” meme. In 2015 the HillObama crew and its willing accomplices in the Deep State launched that malevolent campaign of prevarication, with Donald Trump as its target.
  The lie has since been thoroughly exposed, but, as Bill Clinton’s crew used to chant, “Hey — So What??!! That’s Old News!!”
  But old lies die hard, and the drumbeat of “Russia!! Russia!!” lives on in America’s subconscious. As Lenin demonstrated in 1917, symbols and slogans of the past can be easily hijacked, resuscitated, emptied of their former content, refilled with swill, and manipulated as pawns in the Party’s agitprop.
  In 2015 the Cold War symbol of “Russia the Enemy” was resurrected as a weapon to attack Donald Trump. Today’s revised and updated version of the meme serves two harmonious ends: 1) to fuel Joe Biden’s massive campaign of distraction from his destruction, and — surprise! — 2) to reignite the subtle but powerful specter of the evil Trump, just in time for 2024.
  The bottom line here is simple: Joe Biden’s pretense of “foreign” policy is simply a vile domestic campaign gimmick in his efforts to avoid a Democrat Armageddon. His insouciant calumnies are cavalier and calamitous, but that doesn’t bother Catholic Joe. Like Wilson and FDR before him, he is relying on war to minimize Democrats’ losses while it enhances their powers.
  But however disastrous, at least the two world wars were constitutionally declared by Congress. Of the many wars that America has fought since1945, we haven’t won one yet.
  Clearly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was illegal, a fundamental violation of international law. Biden’s cynical response doesn’t change that. Nonetheless, Russia aside, his current, undeclared folly in Ukraine has already claimed one victim: Republicans.
  We assume that Biden wants to continue this perilous enterprise far beyond November. Indeed, it will continue until he is stopped. But stopped by whom? Not the GOP.

Sorting It Out

Six months ago, addled GOP stalwarts bought into the feeling frenzy that prompted a bipartisan coalition on Capitol Hill to print tens of billions of dollars and send massive amounts of offensive military hardware eight time zones away to one of the most corrupt countries in the world. GOP stalwarts topped it off by voting against a proposal to require an audit of the funds.
Whatever happens in November’s elections, Republicans are stuck with this undeclared proxy war. Unfortunately, they’ll share the blame when the inevitable and possibly disastrous consequences play out.
As for the nukes, they are all too real. The U.S. foreign policy establishment knows, but does not often discuss, the fact that Putin’s reliance on his own nuclear arsenal has long been a basic ingredient of Russia’s basic strategic doctrine. In 2000, Russia announced publicly that, regarding a possible future conflict with China, it would no longer respond to a conventional attack with a conventional response, but would immediately go nuclear.
After all, as one observer notes: “It’s rather hard to imagine winning a land war against 1,400,000,000 Chinese.”
In the meantime, while Biden has his own domestic propaganda campaign, Putin has his. And ironically, America’s Left has been providing him with plenty of material.
When he announced the formal annexation of four regions of Ukraine as members of the Russian Federation, Putin said:
“Do we want to have here, in our country, in Russia, ‘parent number one, parent number two, and parent number three’ (they have completely lost it!) instead of mother and father? Do we want our schools to impose on our children, from their earliest days in school, perversions that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want to drum into their heads the ideas that certain other genders exist along with women and men and to offer them gender reassignment surgery? Is that what we want for our country and our children? This is all unacceptable to us. We have a different future of our own.”

Texas Catholic Tossup

Every Democrat in every key race this fall supports abortion up to birth, LifeNews.com reports:
“In debates with Republican opponents, Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, Michigan Cong. Elissa Slotkin, Ohio Cong. Tim Ryan, and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly expressed support for legal abortion up to the moment of birth. Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams have also taken the same position.”
In another major race, this one between two Catholics, former Cong. Robert Francis (Beto) O’Rourke (D) is vying to defeat Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R). In their only debate, the governor called out Beto on abortion:
“Beto’s position is the most extreme because he not only supports abortion of a fully developed child to the very last second before birth, he’s even against providing medical care for a baby who survives an abortion. He is for unlimited abortion at taxpayer expense.”
Beto called it a lie. “No one thinks that in the state of Texas!” he said.
But Beto got it wrong. This past July, every Texas Democrat in Congress but one voted “aye” to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which allows abortion through the ninth month. The outlier was longtime Cong. Henry Cuellar, whose pro-life record prompted the abortion industry to find and finance pro-abortion Jessica Cisneros to run against him in last May’s primary (she almost beat him: Cuellar won 50.2 percent-49.8 percent).
And while Beto joins Seitz at pro-amnesty rallies, Abbott speaks at pro-life rallies.
“The most precious freedom is life itself,” said Gov. Abbott on July 29, 2021. “Our Creator endowed us with the right to life, but millions of children lose that right every year because of abortion. In Texas, we work to spare every child from the ravages of abortion, which is why I am proud to join my fellow governors in protecting the unborn.”
Texas bishops have condemned Gov. Abbott for his stalwart defense of the Rule of Law regarding illegal aliens. So we asked Texas Catholic Bishops’ Conference spokeswoman Helen Osman, “Has any Texas Catholic bishop ever publicly condemned Beto O’Rourke for his position on abortion? Has the Conference?”
We have received no reply.