Year: 2025
I am glad the Israeli hostages are released, BUT!
Well, it seems that the President has been able to force a peace plan on Israel and Hamas. It also seems like the Hamas Hostages have been released. Which I am happy to see. However, something else is about to happen, that I and other believe is going to be a tragic mistake. The bad thing is, it has happened before.
On Oct 7, 2001, the United States began an ill-fated campaign to ‘nation build’ Afghanistan.
Now 24 years after that anniversary and 2 years after the Oct 7 attacks by Hamas, we may be on the cusp of an even worse nation-building program in Gaza that seems to have learned absolutely nothing from the disastrous nation-building operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Right down to resurrecting former UK PM Tony Blair to head ‘nation building’ in Gaza.
Sounds familiar, does it not? We tried this before and it failed badly. Mr. Greenfield lists the reasons why:
- The Bush administration believed that the problem in Afghanistan, Iraq and other Muslim countries wasn’t the people, their culture or Islamic religion, but their governments.
- Bringing ‘democracy’ and ‘free enterprise’ into murderous tribal societies was supposed to marginalize Islamic terrorists by giving the locals something better to do than kill infidels.
- Foreign aid experts and world government types would build a ‘technocratic’ government propped up by international investments to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into Switzerland.
That turned out to be the biggest abortion job of a mistake ever and we’re still sporting the scars from it too.
I very highly suggest that you go read the rest of that article.
You know you are living in strange times, when you find yourself reading and agreeing with something written in Frontpage Magazine! 😮
Trump and the Republicans are going regret this foolishness
Like I have written before, I am truly glad Donald Trump won the election.
However, it appears that The President and the Republicans are reverting back to his antics that happened during his first term.
First there is this, which comes via Molly Ball at the Wall Street Journal:
AUSTIN, Texas—Standing at the wooden lectern at the front of the state House chamber, Republican state Rep. Todd Hunter put the purpose of his legislation to redraw Texas’ congressional map in forthright terms. “The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward,” he said: “Improve Republican political performance.”
What might once have been considered a damning admission was embraced as an explicit rationale as the state House proceeded to pass the map on a party-line vote late Wednesday. Democrats charged that Republicans were shamelessly redrawing the lines ahead of the usual decennial schedule at the behest of President Trump to add five potential congressional seats for their party—and Republicans largely agreed.
The redistricting plan, which is expected to be signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in the coming days, has set off a national partisan arms race, reshuffling the landscape for next year’s midterm elections and potentially permanently altering the parties’ electoral calculations. California has already begun a high-stakes gambit to redraw the massive blue state’s congressional lines in response, while other red states, egged on by the White House, are jockeying to follow Texas’ lead.
The upshot of the redistricting wars looks likely to benefit Republicans overall. And the episode seems fated to stand as yet another illustration of Trump’s willingness to use his stranglehold over his party to maximize his power, polarizing the national landscape and trampling long-held norms in the process, and leaving the opposition dazed.
Then there is this, via the Editorial Board at the Wall Street Journal:
President Trump promised voters during his campaign for a second term that he had bigger things on his mind than retribution against opponents. But it is increasingly clear that vengeance is a large part, maybe the largest part, of how he will define success in his second term.
His revenge campaign took an ominous turn Friday as FBI agents raided the home and office of Mr. Trump’s first-term national security adviser John Bolton. They brought two broad warrants to search the “premises.” Agents showed up unannounced at his Bethesda, Md., home at 7 a.m. They confiscated his wife Gretchen’s phone because it was visible and not on her person. Mr. Bolton had already left for his office, which is where FBI agents greeted him.
Kash Patel, the FBI director, sent out a cryptic tweet at 7:03 Friday morning that “NO ONE is above the law . . . @FBI agents on mission.” He didn’t specify to whom he was referring, but the timing is unlikely to have been coincidental.
It’s hard to see the raid as anything other than vindictive. Mr. Bolton fell out of Mr. Trump’s favor in the first term and then wrote a book about his experience in the White House while Mr. Trump was still President. Mr. Trump tried and failed to block publication. The President then claimed Mr. Bolton had exposed classified information, though the book had gone through an extensive pre-publication scrub at the White House for classified material.
The book investigation faded away under President Biden, but now it looks as if Mr. Patel is reviving it. Whether Mr. Trump ordered the FBI probe or not doesn’t matter. Mr. Patel knows what the President thinks about Mr. Bolton, and the President’s minions in Trump II don’t serve as the check on his worst impulses the way grown-ups did in his first term. The presidential id is now unchained.
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The real offender here is a President who seems to think he can use the powers of his office to run vendettas. We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined.
It seems the President Trump did not learn the lessons from his first term, that ended up being a disaster in the end. Furthermore, it seems that the President is out for revenge. The simpletons in the MAGA movement think that this is awesome. However, the MAGA movement is not the entire conservative movement; they might think they are, but they are not.
You see, there are principled people, like myself, that see these sort of actions as big Government tyranny. Whether it be on the State level, as in Texas or as in the Federal Government. You see, it seems that this “MAGA” Government and President, have something in common with the Neoconservatives of the early 2000’s —- and that is that the MAGA Government and President, love big Government, as long as they control it and it suits their agenda.
What America needs is a President that will respect the idea of limited Government and respect for our Constitution.
Beege Welborn you can do better than that!
What am I talking about? This:
You can read the blog posting here.
Most of the time, Beege is funny. She totally missed the boat on this one. Calling a black woman, the coconut queen is not even remotely funny. Why didn’t she just call the former VP the N-Word and get it over with?
You see, where I come from, which is southwest Detroit, Michigan or “The Hood” as we Southwest Detroit alumni call it; calling a black woman, the coconut queen, would get your butt kicked or worse get your throat cut or get you shot in the head. Not a smart move by HotAir.com, which has been accused of racism and Antisemitism in the past, by former affiliates.
Beege and HotAir.com can and should do better than this nonsense. I mean, the left calls us Trump supporters racist bigots; why prove their point for them? It just does not make any sense to me at all.
Old School Blogger Kevin Drum has died
One of the old school bloggers, from back in the day, has passed away.
Kevin Drum, a left of center blogger, which is, what I was prior to the buildup and election of Obama.
From NYT:
Kevin Drum, who gave up his day job in software marketing to write online about politics, policy and his cats, quickly becoming a key figure in the vanguard of center-left bloggers during the genre’s heyday in the early 2000s, died on March 7. He was 66.
His wife, Marian Drum, announced the death on his website but did not say where he died or cite a cause.
Mr. Drum, who lived in Irvine, Calif., had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2014 and had recently developed pneumonia. He blogged about those personal challenges openly and with the same insight that he brought to issues like health care policy and urban planning.
He spent most of his life in Orange County, Calif., which distinguished him from the majority of early big-name bloggers, many of whom hailed from the Washington-Boston corridor or from academic enclaves.
Mr. Drum began blogging in 2002 and quickly developed a large nationwide following. He helped shape what became known as the liberal blogosphere, populated by a broad amalgam of left-of-center thinkers who emphasized policy debates over political horse races.
His curiosity was broad, and he wrote on a variety of subjects from a variety of perspectives — sometimes casually observational, sometimes rigorously analytical — in a way that set him apart from the assorted camps that defined the blogosphere, including academics, politicos and ideologues.
Brian Delong quoting Ben Dreyfuss:
By 2020, I was the editorial director of Mother Jones and no longer did much of anything directly except oversee the newsletters AND occasionally act as Kevin’s protector. Because the whole liberal journalism universe had gone crazy at this point. We had spent years hiring all these young kids who hated Kevin. They hated anyone with his politics or his tone. He was a normie white lib in Orange County, you know?
He was regularly the main character on Twitter, which wasn’t fair, and internally that spilled over to the point where the Mother Jones union was constantly complaining about him. All these staffers that didn’t know him would go on Twitter and get into a lather about how he was the devil and complain.
The greatest example of this is the movie Parasite. Kevin wrote a blog post about how he doesn’t like subtitles in the specific context of Parasite. I read it and saw nothing wrong with it. The CEO read it and saw nothing wrong with it. Twitter read it and lost its shit. This spilled over into Slack and people were acting like he was in the KKK. I had to email him and say “Hey, please do me a favor and elaborate on your point about subtitles in a new post because all these idiots are misconstruing you and it’s causing problems for me.” He then did do exactly that.
This sounds insane. Who cares if he likes subtitles or not? I hate subtitles. I actually refuse to watch most foreign films because I hate subtitles and dubbing. But this shit was just par for the course at this time.
So, in a sense, Kevin was forced out of Mother Jones, because he was an older white guy, who was not in tune with the radical Neo-Left. Sounds about right to me. I too, basically, left my Left of Center position, because it seemed to me, that white people like me; were not longer welcomed in that party and political spectrum anymore.
Rest in peace, Kevin. Your moderate liberal voice will be missed.
Others: New Republic
America is Back, Finally
Well, Donald J. Trump made it. As I wrote before, I voted for the man. I quite literally had no other choice and basically, I could never really vote Democrat, they have just lost me.
Paraphrasing John Wayne slightly, I voted for the man, I hope he does a good job.
I just hope that the President does not get caught up in the blatant stupidity that hounded his last Presidency. To be fair, he does seem to have a quite competent team around him this time.
I do hope, however, that the President is able to get this Nation back on the path that it desperately needs to return to being on.
I hope the prices on food, gas, goods, and other such things drop back to acceptable levels.
I hope that we can cast the Neocon, internationalist Democrat style of foreign policy, trade, and world outlook into the dustbin of history as an example of what not to do.
I hope that Democratic Socialism is cast into the ash heap of history, as a tragic mistake that almost cost the Democratic Party any sort of political legitimacy and it will be viewed as an flawed political doctrine and that the Democrats will never, ever give those fools any sort of place at the table of political discourse ever again.
I hope that the MAGA movement and Donald J. Trump’s fight to regain the White House is used by Conservatives to political students of the Republican Party on how to effectively reach those who are not a part of your normal demographic and as an cautionary tale of what happens when a movement gets out of control of its intended purpose. (See Jan 6)
I hope that the Republican Party, President Trump and the Conservative movement as a whole, does not get cocky and use this victory to bash the Democratic Party over the head. Their resounding defeat in the election did that very well.
I hope that President Donald Trump does not abuse his power as President.
Other than that, I have nothing to say really.
I am just glad that America is back!
