By CHRISTOPHER MANION
CBS News reports that the Army’s 101st Airborne Division has been deployed to Europe for the first time since World War II. American units are practicing with live tank and artillery rounds in Romania, not far from Ukraine.
Speaking of World War II, the U.S. entered that conflict after a constitutional Declaration of War by Congress. In fact, that was the last constitutional war fought by the United States, and we haven’t won a war since.
Of course, history buffs can point to the United Nations or congressional funding to justify — or at least to explain — our undeclared wars in Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But today, we have brigadier generals in Europe following up on Joe Biden’s “Armageddon” outburst earlier this month, publicly stating that they’re ready and willing to send U.S. troops into Ukraine to “fight a war against Russia.”
Brig. Gen. John Lubas serves as deputy commander of a U.S. division based in Romania. And of one thing we can be sure: Deputy commanders do not declare wars. Congress does. So we can be sure that, when Gen. Lubas talks about being ready to fight a war against Russia at a moment’s notice, he is not doing it on his own: He is a professional soldier, and in saying this to the press he is just following orders.
And who is issuing those orders? Is it Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? The same Gen. Milley who’s spending most of his time forcing transsexuals into our military units worldwide?
Hardly. Gen. Milley is “just following orders” as well. They’re coming from the White House. Like Woodrow Wilson and FDR before him, Joe Biden wants war — and it’s all designed to protect him and his destructive domestic agenda. Case in point: Just this week, the “House Progressive Caucus,” comprising the most radical Democrats in Congress, was slapped down for asking Joe Biden to try diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine.
Diplomacy might end the war, and Democrats want to keep the war going. Endless and undeclared.
Why?
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Democrats have been running against Vladimir Putin. As a distraction from Biden’s domestic disasters, the war in the Ukraine is the gift that keeps on giving.
Last March, Biden blamed the rising cost of gas on “Putin’s price hike.”
Joe to American families: “Don’t blame me for the highest inflation rate in forty years, blame Vlad.”
Forty years? Well, Ronald Reagan had the perfect response to that kind of bilge when Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale were spouting it back then:
“There you go again!”
But Joe thinks that it’s working.
Two months ago Biden upped the ante in Philadelphia: “MAGA Republicans” are a “threat to democracy.”
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi joins in, calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine an “attack on democracy.”
Conclusion: Democrats are wrapping Putin, Trump, and “MAGA Republicans” in the “Russia!! Russia!!” banner and they’ll run against all three until 2024 to “save our democracy.”
Shades Of 1962?
Or Shady All Around?
When he invoked “Armageddon” two weeks ago, Biden said that the last time we were so close to Armageddon was during “the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
That crisis, which occurred sixty years ago this week, is alive and well in the Democrat imagination today.
“The most basic historical fact about midterm elections is that the president’s party almost always loses seats in the House, and loses seats in the Senate about two-thirds of the time,” writes historian Andrew Busch.
But the 1962 midterms were a rare exception, he continues. In mid-October 1962, Democrats were in the same sinking boat that they are today, expected to lose over 40 seats in the House alone. But sixty years ago this week, John F. Kennedy famously forced Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev to remove Russian missiles from Cuba, and Busch writes that Democrats lost “a mere four seats in the House and actually gaining four seats in the Senate.”
“Democrats also suffered no net loss in governorships,” he adds, “the only time the President’s party could say that from the 1920s to 1986. Some of Kennedy’s fiercest critics, like Senators Walter Judd of Minnesota and Homer Capehart of Indiana, went down to defeat, and so did Richard Nixon in his bid to become Governor of California.”
Those historic wins were crucial. In the next two years, the 88th Congress passed JFK’s tax cuts, the Civil Rights Act, and LBJ’s “Great Society” legislation.
The Kennedy-Khrushchev Accords changed history, both at home and abroad. They were so central, in fact, that we wonder, why did the State Department fight so tenaciously to keep details of the Accords secret for a quarter century?
Perhaps it was because in 1988 it was finally revealed that the United States had never verified that the Russian missiles had actually been removed from Cuba.
But hey, so what!!?? To the generations of hagiographers who even today glorify JFK and Camelot, such factual details are of minor importance.
Of interest: The 1962 crisis was the origin of the now-familiar “October Surprise” genre of unexpected events designed to change the outcome of November elections at the last moment.
It worked in 1962. Does Joe Biden have something similar in mind for the next ten days?
Looking Toward 2024
The GOP has big plans for the 118th Congress — countless (and necessary) investigations, hearings, even a couple of badly needed impeachments.
But it won’t be clear sailing. Democrats have their own agenda. And they’ll start with a full-scale attack on Republican “big spenders.”
Wait a minute. You’d think after spending $7 trillion, the Democrats would be the big spenders. Well, they are. But Joe Biden has left Republicans with a lot of bills to pay. And they are billion-dollar bills.
Consider: “Russia!!” Since February, Congress has authorized sending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars and military hardware to Ukraine.
You don’t have to be a Republican to recognize the danger that this drawdown poses to American security. It will take them years, and cost over $100 billion, to replenish those vital supplies.
And they won’t be able to blame the Democrats. A majority of Republicans on Capitol Hill voted for that Ukraine aid, just like all the Democrats did.
But wait, there’s more.
Americans see gas prices on every street corner in the country every day.
So Joe Biden has been desperately trying to lower the price of gas by depleting our country’s strategic oil reserves.
Illegal? Probably. Irresponsible? Absolutely. But it will be the responsible Republicans who have to purchase the oil to replace Biden’s drawdown — and at today’s price of some $90 a barrel, that will amount to some $25 billion.
Now it is true, as Byron York points out, that Donald Trump wanted to top off the strategic oil reserve in 2020, when oil was $24 a barrel. Democrats stripped that provision from the 2020 spending bill, so today’s Republicans will have to pay four times as much to do the job.
Moreover, Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan left $80 billion of American military equipment and untold billions in U.S. cash in the hands of the Taliban. That equipment and cash will eventually have to be replaced. In 2023 it will cost a lot more than $80 billion.
So: Replenish the oil? Democrats will chime, “Republicans are giving billions to big oil!”
Rebuild the military? “GOP gives billions to Military-Industrial Complex, taking it from average Americans who are suffering — especially the poor and minorities!”
While Washington slogs on, the real action next year will be in 50 state legislatures. The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision has set the stage for pro-life efforts nationwide to pass legislation that will make history.
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