General
Back in 2014 Andrew Joyce penned an article on the despicable John Hagee and I wrote one in 2010. Hagee is still at it, now advertising on Fox and who knows where else to raise money for Ukrainian Jews. Not a mention of the fact that Jews are at most 1 percent of Ukraine’s population. But their safety is far more important to Hagee than the safety of his fellow Christians.
By bragging publicly that we helped engineer the killing of Russian generals and the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, we taunt Russian President Vladimir Putin. We provoke him into retaliating in kind against us, thereby raising the possibility of a wider U.S.-Russia war that could escalate into World War III.
Last week, sources leaked to The New York Times that, in Ukraine’s targeting and killing of Russian generals and the sinking of Russia’s Black Sea flagship, the Moskva, U.S. intelligence played an indispensable role.
Apparently, our intel people identified and located for the Ukrainian forces what became the targets of their deadly attacks.
Why U.S. intelligence would do this seems inexplicable.
By claiming credit for Ukraine’s most visible military successes, we diminish the achievements of that country’s own forces.
By bragging publicly that we helped engineer the killing of Russian generals and the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, we taunt Russian President Vladimir Putin. We provoke him into retaliating in kind against us, thereby raising the possibility of a wider U.S.-Russia war that could escalate into World War III.
Moreover, U.S. boasting like this plays right into Putin’s narrative that Russia is facing and fighting in Ukraine a U.S.-led alliance that is out to crush Russia.
Indeed, why are we going beyond assistance to the Ukrainians in defending themselves, into making this American’s war?
When Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in Poland following her visit to Kyiv, she virtually embraced the idea of the Ukraine-Russia war as now being America’s war, declaring, “America stands with Ukraine. We stand with Ukraine until victory is won.”
Accompanying Pelosi to Kyiv was a delegation of House Democrats, one of whom, Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, echoed Pelosi in Poland:
“The United States of America is in this to win.”
Their visit followed that of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who came out of Kyiv and declared the U.S. strategic goals in Ukraine’s war:
“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kind of things it has done in invading Ukraine.”
These statements by U.S. leaders reinforce Putin’s line that Russia is besieged by a U.S.-led Western alliance that fears and detests Mother Russia and wishes to see her defeated and diminished.
Our enemies in the West who seek to destroy Russia are like those we fought in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, Putin now claims. And intervention in Ukraine was necessary to prevent today’s neo-Nazis from dragging Ukraine into their larger conspiracy to destroy Russia.
Consider Putin’s words of a week ago:
“The forces that have always pursued a policy of containing Russia … do not want such a huge and independent country that is too big for their ideas. … They believe it endangers them simply by the fact of its existence, although this is far from reality. It is they who endanger the world.”
We are hated for who and what we are, says Putin. And our military operation is an act of legitimate self-defense against the same kind of “Nazi filth” we fought in the Great Patriotic War.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov describes the recent surge in heavy Western weapons shipments to Ukraine as “NATO … going to war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy.”
By cutting Republicans out of her delegation to Kyiv, Pelosi appears to want to make the war not only America’s war, but her party’s cause.
That seems to be a motive as well behind Biden’s consciously exceeding any Western leader in the language he uses on Putin, calling him a “killer,” a “murderous dictator,” a “pure thug,” a “butcher,” a “war criminal,” guilty of “genocide,” who “for God’s sake … cannot remain in power.”
Such language is designed to showcase Biden as the world’s leading anti-Putinist and the most morally outraged of all the world’s leaders at what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
But, again, like the public boasting of U.S. intel agents over our role in the sinking of the Moskva and killing of the Russian generals, the effect is to disqualify the U.S. president from any role in negotiating a truce or an end to this war.
How do we benefit from having no leader-to-leader communication with the Kremlin, which President John F. Kennedy retained in the Cuban missile crisis to end it?
NATO Europe, which is supporting the Ukrainian resistance, is not on board with the U.S. plans to cripple Russia permanently.
America needs to recognize that our objectives in this war are not the same as Ukraine’s.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would like to have the U.S. plunge in and fight alongside Kyiv, devastate and defeat the Russian army, and expel Russia not only from the regions invaded this year but also from Crimea, which Putin annexed in 2014 .
America’s vital interests in this war, however, are to prevent it from becoming a U.S.-Russia war or a third world war or a nuclear war.
The U.S. goal of imposing a crushing defeat of Russian aggression is secondary to our far more vital interest in avoiding a U.S.-Russia war.
America’s interests are best served by an early and negotiated peace. Such a goal rules out imposing humiliating terms on Russia, which cause Moscow and Putin to escalate militarily — to survive politically.
The wild card in Biden’s poker hand is the war in Ukraine… But dissent is rising. Why, it is being asked, are we so focused on the Eastern borders of Ukraine when the Southern border of the United States is being breached illegally by 200,000 invaders every month… some of whom are sex traffickers, drug dealers, terrorists and members of Mexican cartels.
“Sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.”
In the movie classic “Cool Hand Luke,” the convict Luke, played by Paul Newman, explains that to his fellow inmates after winning the pot in a hand of poker without even a pair of deuces.
President Joe Biden should take notice. For, right now, “nothing” is the hand he is looking at going into the 2022 election.
With the economy the predominant issue, the last business day of April brought disquieting news for Democrats.
“Nasdaq Caps Worst Month Since 2008,” blared Saturday’s lead headline in The Wall Street Journal. “Dismal Data Fuel Stagflation Fears,” ran the top headline in the Financial Times.
“Market Plunge Reflects Alarm of Pain Ahead,” blared The New York Times. Subhead: “Decline in April was worst in two years.”
“Trajectory in Question as Markets Tank Again,” said page one of The Washington Post. To what was the Post referring?
Nasdaq had closed down over 4%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down over 900 points on the day. The S&P 500 was off 3.6% Friday, raising April’s loss to nearly 9% of its value. Not since World War II has the S&P begun a year with a worse performance.
This bloodbath in the markets is piled atop an 8.5% inflation rate and a shrinkage of 1.4% in the GDP over the first quarter. If a similar decline follows in the second quarter, the economy on which Biden’s party stands or falls in November will officially be in recession.
With Biden’s disapproval rating already running 10 points higher than his 42% approval, the economic issue could bring an even larger rout of House Democrats than would be normal at the midterms.
The issue now ranked second as a national concern is the crisis on the border where 2 million illegal migrants crossed over in Biden’s first year and the “gotaways” who evaded every U.S. official while sneaking in are estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
Some 8,000 migrants now cross the U.S. border every day. And according to the Biden administration itself, half again that many will be crossing daily if Title 42, which enables border authorities to turn back migrants into Mexico for health concerns, is lifted this month.
Third in voters’ concern is the explosion in violent crime, especially “mass killings” that involve four victims dead or wounded, not including the perpetrator. This year, mass killings are nearly matching the record number set in Biden’s first year.
There was a time when mass murder, like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago by the Al Capone gang, or Charlie Starkweather’s murderous rampage across the Great Plains in 1958, were rare events.
Now people shooting up malls, trains and subways, and running down people with cars and trucks are daily occurrences.
Biden is not responsible for the explosion of carjackings and mass killings or cop shootings. But his party has come to be identified with its left wing’s campaign to “defund the police” and refocus on the “root causes” of crime, the social conditions said to produce criminals, rather than the criminals themselves.
The Republican Party has come to be identified with solutions that involve more police, more prosecutors and more prison cells and inmates, which, increasingly, is where the country is at.
In addition to the issues turning against the Democrats, Biden has himself become a drag on the party. His low poll numbers, verbal foot faults, visible frailty and perceived “cognitive decline” all handicap efforts to portray him as a strong, engaged and decisive leader.
The wild card in Biden’s poker hand is the war in Ukraine.
Biden has funneled $3.7 billion into the Ukrainian war effort and sent Javelin and Stinger missiles and, lately, heavy artillery. He is pressing Congress for an additional $33 billion — $20 billion of that in military aid — over the next five months of this fiscal year.
Thus far, the U.S. political class in this capital has been largely united and supportive of the Ukrainians.
But dissent is rising. Why, it is being asked, are we so focused on the Eastern borders of Ukraine when the Southern border of the United States is being breached illegally by 200,000 invaders every month, and thousands more “gotaways” — some of whom are sex traffickers, drug dealers, terrorists and members of Mexican cartels.
The future of the United States is not likely to be altered in a significant way by who eventually controls Mariupol or the Sea of Azov.
But more than 2 million migrants every year walking into the United States at will cannot but have an impact on the future character and composition of the nation that has lost control of its border.
Is whether Moscow controls Luhansk and Donetsk, which it did for the duration of the Cold War and for decades before, more important to us than whether the America we grew up in becomes more of a Third World than a Western nation?
When the draft Supreme Court opinion overruling “Roe v. Wade” leaked on Monday, my first thought was: WHY COULDN’T THEY WAIT UNTIL NEXT YEAR? (“Roe” is in quotes because Planned Parenthood v. Casey already overruled Roe, but “Roe” is still used to describe the nonexistent right to abortion.)
Yes, it’s human life we’re talking about. Millions of babies are killed in their mothers’ wombs each year — it’s a massacre. On the other hand, I thought, ending late-terms might end the midterms.
But then I read Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion and was intellectually offended all over again by the idea that one of our precious constitutional rights, enshrined in a founding document, is the right to kill an unborn baby. Anyone complaining about the decision should be required to cite the exact parts Alito got wrong. Be specific. And keep in mind, no important discussion of constitutional law has ever begun with the words, “My vagina …”
The Nation magazine’s Elie Mystal took a stab at it by completely misstating Alito’s argument, then saying, “the Founding Fathers were racist, misogynist jerkfaces.” (I was planning on writing a scholarly and nuanced treatise on the framers, but Mystal just stole my title!)
I also noticed that, outside of the media, no one seems especially bothered by the decision. Or to have noticed it. In groups of liberal women, apolitical women, black and Puerto Rican women, no one is talking about the case.
They’re probably right. The end of a court-managed “constitutional” right to abortion isn’t going to produce the Roemageddon Democrats are predicting.
The Mississippi law being upheld in this case — contrary to everything I’ve heard on MSNBC — is shockingly reasonable.
It states:
“Except in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality, a person shall not intentionally or knowingly perform or induce an abortion of an unborn human being if the probable gestational age of the unborn human being has been determined to be greater than fifteen (15) weeks.”
The Mississippi legislature provided a series of factual findings:
— at eight weeks gestational age the “unborn human being begins to move in the womb”;
— at nine weeks “all basic physiological functions are present”;
— at 10 weeks “vital organs begin to function,” and “hair, fingernails, and toenails begin to form”;
— at 11 weeks “an unborn human being’s diaphragm is developing,” and he or she “may move about freely in the womb;” and
— at 12 weeks the “unborn human being” has “taken on the human form in all relevant respects.”
After 15 weeks, the legislature found, most abortions involve crushing and tearing the fetus apart.
Laws should always err on the side against the decision-maker, and the decision-maker on the length of gestation is going to be the abortionist. (Which is also why “rape” and “incest” exceptions swallow the whole law. By the way, whatever happened to the morning-after pill?)
So we’re really talking about four to five months.
That’s not enough time? Give me a break, you freaks. I don’t think voters are going to say, Ukraine, inflation, the border, crime, transgenders in kindergarten — OH MY GOD, I CAN ONLY GET AN ABORTION FOR FOUR MONTHS???
Some states will surely roll back the right to abortion more than 15 weeks. Oh well. The abortion ladies will have to travel to other states the same way gunners do now to practice their marksmanship, shoppers do to get plastic bags, or breathers do to take off their masks.
With a patchwork of laws, we’ll be able to see which regulations do best at reducing abortion, illegitimacy (which soared in lockstep with the legalization of abortion), venereal diseases, suicides and false claims of rape when women are pressured into having sex, undeterred by the risk of pregnancy. We’ll call it “federalism.”
Watching MSNBC’s reaction also reminded me that everybody hates the feminists. The ladies couldn’t even keep the “#MeToo” movement going. How long did that last? Fifteen minutes? And a lot of the cases were egregious. But a month later, transgenders were canceling J.K. Rowling and women’s sports.
Now they’re hysterically babbling about the court banning contraception, interracial marriages and requiring forced sterilizations. I guess they don’t think their arguments about the abortion ruling are particularly strong, so they have to warn about scary rulings to come.
Finally, President Joe Biden has put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the response to this decision. Previously, she was put in charge of the border, and then Ukraine. Any day now, we’ll find out she was in charge of the Challenger space shuttle.
Maybe I’m just in a cheery mood, what with the imminent conclusion to this hideous chapter in U.S history. Who knows? Let’s wait nine months and see.
I have only two absolutely definite predictions flowing from the leak of the abortion opinion:
1) Liberals are about to start claiming that Black people not only are incapable of getting IDs to vote, but are also incapable of knowing that they’ve been pregnant for four months. (And then: NIGHTMARE! THEY’LL HAVE TO GET A BUS TO NEW YORK OR CALIFORNIA!)
2) As for the leaker, if the perp turns out to be a conservative who was trying to pressure Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Neil Gorsuch, he will be ruined for life. If he turns out to be a clerk for one of the liberals, he will get a book contract and a regular spot on MSNBC.
COPYRIGHT 2022 ANN COULTER
Nothing done in Ukraine in this two-month war has diminished the Russian arsenal of 6,000 nuclear weapons, the world’s largest stockpile. And the more we destroy Russian conventional power, the more we force Moscow to fall back onto its ace in the hole — nuclear weapons.
“Once war is forced upon us, there is no alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory — not prolonged indecision.”
So said Gen. Douglas MacArthur in his April 1951 address to Congress after being fired by President Harry Truman as commander in chief in the Korean War.
And what is now America’s goal with our massive infusion into the Ukraine war of new and heavier NATO weapons?
Said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on his return from a Sunday meeting in Kyiv with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: The United States wants “to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine.”
“Russia,” said Austin, has “already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops … and we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”
Thus, the new, or newly revealed, goal of U.S. policy in Ukraine is not just the defeat and retreat of the invading Russian army but the crippling of Russia as a world power.
The sanctions imposed on Russia and the advanced weapons we are shipping into Ukraine are not only to enable the country to preserve its independence and territorial integrity but also to inflict irreversible damage on Mother Russia.
Putin’s Russia is not to recover soon or ever from the beating we intend to administer, using Ukrainians to deliver the beating, over an extended period of time.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has seen through to the true objectives of some NATO allies: “There are countries within NATO that want the Ukraine war to continue. They see the continuation of the war as weakening Russia. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine.”
But to increase steadily and substantially the losses to Russia’s economy, as well as its military, the war must go on longer.
And a long war translates into ever-greater losses to the Ukrainians who are alone in paying the price in blood of defeating Russia.
Is Austin committed to fighting this war to the last Ukrainian?
How many dead Russian soldiers — currently, the estimate of Russian losses is 15,000 of its invasion force — will it take to satisfy Austin and the Americans?
To achieve, say, a loss of 50,000 dead Russians, how many Ukrainians would have to lose their lives as well? How many Ukrainian cities would have to share the fate of Mariupol?
Clearly, the Joe Biden-Lloyd strategy of indefinitely bleeding Russia contradicts MacArthur’s dictum: “War’s very object is victory — not prolonged indecision.”
Does a war to bleed the other side to death also contradict the moral conditions for a just war?
Then there are the practical considerations.
When we say we will so weaken Russia that it cannot threaten its neighbors again, we are talking about conventional weapons and power.
Nothing done in Ukraine in this two-month war has diminished the Russian arsenal of 6,000 nuclear weapons, the world’s largest stockpile.
And the more we destroy Russian conventional power, the more we force Moscow to fall back onto its ace in the hole — nuclear weapons.
Asked Tuesday about the risk of a nuclear war emanating from the conflict, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov replied.
“The risks now are considerable. I would not want to elevate those risks artificially. Many would like that. The danger is serious, real. And we must not underestimate it.”
Putin put it this way: “If anyone sets out to intervene in the current events from the outside and creates unacceptable threats for us that are strategic in nature, they should know that our response will be lightning-fast … “We have all the tools for this that no one else can boast of having. … We’ll use them if needed. And I want everyone to know that.”
Tactical nuclear warheads aboard hypersonic missiles would seem to fit precisely what Putin was describing.
Which raises the question: Will Putin accept a U.S.-induced permanent reduction in Russia’s standing as a great nation? Or would Russia resort to weapons that could avoid that fate and avoid as well the long and debilitating “forever war” some Americans want to impose on his country?
If we are going to bleed Russia into an irreversible strategic decline, is Putin a ruler of the mindset to go quietly into that good night?
Are Putin & Co. bluffing with this implied nuclear threat?
When Georgia invaded South Ossetia in 2008, Putin’s Russian army reacted instantly, ran the Georgians out and stormed into Georgia itself.
When the U.S. helped to overthrow the pro-Russian government in Kyiv in 2014, Russia plunged in and took Crimea, the Sevastopol naval base, and Luhansk and Donetsk.
When Ukraine flirted with joining NATO and Biden refused to rule out the possibility, Putin invaded in February.
When he warns of military action, Putin has some credibility.
And in this talk of using tactical atomic weapons to prevent the defeat, humiliation and diminution of Russia itself, is Vladimir Putin bluffing?
I want to send flowers and chocolates to the Twitter employee who permanently suspended The Babylon Bee. Maybe a car. Apparently, it was the inanity of that decision that incensed Elon Musk, whereupon he decided to purchase the entire platform to stop the censorship.
Liberals, until five minutes ago: Elon Musk is a climate hero! Electric cars! Solar power! He loves Obama!
Liberals, five minutes ago: He believes in free speech? Fascist!
Loads of liberals are threatening to leave Twitter if Musk’s deal goes through. To those who will miss The New York Times’ Charles Blow, I understand. I will try to ease the pain by tweeting, every day for the rest of my life: “[FILL IN THE BLANK] is racist!”
If you’re wondering why liberals are freaking out over the idea of free speech on one single internet platform, it’s because their ideas are so well thought-out and compellingly argued that they must have total control of all social media, mainstream media, entertainment, elementary schools, colleges, universities, nonprofits, corporate PR departments, government funding agencies, advertising firms and on and on and on. Any interruption to Big Brother being pumped into our brains 24 hours a day, and everything falls apart.
A hysterical Twitter employee in the “toxicity and health” department (I’m not making that up) denounced Musk to a Times reporter, saying, “he doesn’t know anything about our policies and what we do … his statement about our [algorithm] was f***ing insane. … Were (sic) just gonna let everyone run amok?”
Running “amok” is defined as: calling a man in a dress a “man.” That’s the Babylon Bee tweet that led to a Twitter death sentence, with no trial, no due process, no appeal.
Twitter employees, the Times reports, are “worried that Mr. Musk would undo the years of work they have put into cleaning up the toxic corners of the platform.” (Yes, you are correct: These are the same people mocking 4-year-olds trapped in kindergarten classrooms with teachers telling them Whiteness is evil and they can be any gender they want.)
Do Twitter employees know how Twitter works? Take a theoretical hate-speaker — a fat-shaming Klanner, an anti-vax Nazi or Dave Chappelle. Their literally murderous tweets are invisible — unless you intentionally, willfully, mindfully click their “follow” buttons. In order to avoid seeing “toxic” tweets, this is what you have to do: NOTHING!
But Twitter moderators are terrified that someone, somewhere, is laughing at a tweet. They are the mutant baby of medieval scolds and the East German Stasi.
Conservatives can only dream of a Twitter without constant, daily self-censorship, without their followers being secretly removed, their feeds hidden, their accounts being shadow-banned — or completely banned.
But what if this is all just Musk doing an elaborate troll?
Somebody should buy Twitter, as I explained last November to the richest person I know under 70. (The richest people I know over the age of 70 are giving all their money to Sen. Tim Scott and Candace Owens to prove they’re not “racist.”)
Here it is, my personal private email, names redacted:
Date: Nov. 30, 2021, at 2:04:51 a.m. EST
Subject: You should buy Twitter and I’ll tell you why …
ALL news comes from Twitter. Facebook is for getting in touch with high school friends and the “topic” groups are mostly nuts — anti-vax, stop the steal, black conspiracy theories. Same w/the newer platforms like Telegram. Snapchat and Instagram are for “influencers,” wannabe Kardashians.
Twitter is where the NYT, Politico and Fox News etc. get their stories and find their guests. Have one of your ppl read my Twitter feed and then watch XXXXX for a week. I’m his unpaid booker and content provider, except, sadly, when I get lazy and he goes off on his own with some moronic “expose” …
No one under 60 watches cable news, but YYYY, who’s about 90, calls me after XXXXX’s show every night and breathlessly tells me about stories that are 12 to 36 hours old on Twitter, half the time from my Twitter feed.
Even w/Twitter’s censorship of conservatives, the smartest right-wing pushback on the news has all come from Twitter. E.g. this week, HUGE meme on Twitter about the establishment media describing the BLM terrorist mowing down the lovely xmas parade in Waukesha as a “car crash,” or “SUV runs into parade.” There was also the msm’s decision to describe every rt-wing response to lib lunacy as “Republicans Pounce …”
There are a lot of smart ppl on Twitter (also idiots, but no one has to follow the idiots) who could never be employed by the NYT, National Review or Fox. Andy Ngo exposing antifa, the anti-CRT guy posting school teaching materials, the guy who keeps graphing mask-wearing vs. covid cases (“I.M.” on Twitter), the real-time videos of BLM riots and arson — none of this would exist but for Twitter.
Before that, the defense of Rittenhouse, Jake Gardner and Nick Sandmann — it all came from Twitter. (Recall National Review was nastily ANTI-Sandmann and anti-Rittenhouse.)
We used to have Drudge, but he’s not serving the function of vox populi anymore. Without Twitter, the only thing Fox News would talk about is the Middle East [We may now substitute “Ukraine”]. All important news comes from Twitter.
Twitter is …
1) where the action is, massively influential;
2) perfect for someone else to take it over and make it better, merely by firing the Twitter censors — Twitter aggressively banned tweets that were pro-Rittenhouse (accurate as it turned out), about Hunter Biden (ditto); plus there’s the aggressive censorship of specific popular conservatives, who are either thrown off (e.g. Gavin McInnes and Milo) or shadow-banned (me and others);
3) it would be pretty easy to turn into a money-making operation! The big issue for all news — TV, cable, Amazon Prime, and all online content is how to get ADVERTISING in front of consumers. No one wants to click through ads. The great thing about Twitter is that you could insert ads in people’s Twitter feeds — and it wouldn’t be annoying. I’ve never understood why Dorsey doesn’t do that. It doesn’t distract much, you just keep scrolling if you’re not interested.
Twitter is a fabulous product. It is, as Musk says, the nation’s public square. With a few minor tweaks — stop being Nazi block-watchers and allow ads in people’s Twitter feeds — instead of Tesla funding Twitter, someday Twitter could fund Tesla.
COPYRIGHT 2022 ANN COULTER
