Archive for 2021

GOOD NEWS, IF TRUE: Biden’s team faces the ugly facts on China.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent rebukes of China give hope that the Biden administration recognizes the truth about this vicious regime.

On NBC’s “Today,” Blinken called Beijing’s coronavirus coverup a “profound problem” that continues “even today,” accusing the Communist country of failing to live up to international obligations since the first cases popped up in 2019.

Before that, he said during confirmation hearings that China’s mass detention of Uighur Muslims qualifies as “genocide.” He even admitted that Team Trump was right to take a tougher stance against China.

Beijing is already whining that these words amount to “interfering in its domestic affairs and undermining its interests.”

The good news is that the Bidenites have also offered more than words, by rushing a US Navy group to support Taiwan during the mainland’s latest effort to intimidate the free, democratic island nation.

Let’s hope this attitude continues.

JOHNNY F-BOMB:

Former CIA Director John O. Brennan is an angry man, and his anger mismanagement issues emerge not in the preface to his memoir but in its title, which reads Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad. The CIA is an executive branch organization focused on foreign intelligence, intentionally headquartered across the Potomac in McLean, Virginia, separated from the White House, State Department, Congress, and all the other policy and partisan bodies. So, who are a CIA director’s domestic enemies—terrorist sleeper cells? Russian illegals? Shady companies aiding Iran’s nuclear procurement efforts? These would be valid targets for joint FBI-CIA attention, and probably anger too.

Four hundred pages later, the reader finds that Brennan’s list contains none of these but it is long, and he exhausts his thesaurus of abusive language against them: Arlen Specter, Richard Grenell, Devin Nunes, Lindsey Graham, Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Pompeo, Trey Gowdy, Michael Scheuer, and Gina Haspel (on and off; she didn’t invite him to CIA holiday parties), and the CIA’s Directorate of Operations generally. Pride of place goes, of course, to Donald Trump. Before Brennan has even met the newly elected Trump, but is en route to brief him in early January 2017, he records that the “mere thought” of the meeting “jarred my very soul.” Brennan’s meetings with, say, Yasser Arafat evince no such dread, and in fact are recounted pretty jauntily.

Brennan’s outbursts are a consistent theme in this memoir. They are often blamed on his “Irish temper,” as if his rage is something external, like an unruly Irish setter that jumps on strangers. Trump is “evil despicable, and vile,” with bad qualities—“incompetence, dishonesty, and cravenness,” especially when Andrew McCabe was fired from the FBI, on St. Patrick’s Day no less, when “my Irish dander was more easily ruffled.”

They often come at a cost: In late 2006, a hot-tempered draft op-ed piece attacking President Bush, while never published, found its way to the White House and would cost Brennan the job of deputy DNI a year later. His famous anti-Trump meltdown when McCabe was fired cost him a gig at Booz Allen Hamilton, and his implausible threat of a lawsuit when his clearances were pulled cost him a consultancy contract with Kissinger Associates.

Sod off, Swamp Thing.

HERE COMES $2 TRILLION WORTH OF PAIN: Hans Bader at Liberty Unyielding explains why the national response to the vastly more lethal Spanish Flu of 1918 was superior to the current lockdowns and multi-Trillion-dollar relief packages.

Or, to put it another way, when government says the solution to a problem is A, you know it’s almost invariably actually the precise opposite of A.

AGAIN, I’VE BEEN PUTTING UP THE IP THAT REVERTED:

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Noah’s Boy.

 

Tom Ormson and Kyrie Smith are suffering the growing pains of young romance and young business people. Tom worries obsessively about the new fryer in the diner exploding.
As though he didn’t have enough on his mind, though, life decides it’s time for a sabretooth with vengeance on her mind to come to town, and for the Great Sky Dragon to try to arrange a marriage for Tom.
Meanwhile, out at the old amusement park, the one with the really good wooden roller-coaster, a series of bizarre murders is taking place.
And, as if that were not enough, Conan Lung, dragon shifter, ex-triad member and waiter extraordinaire starts his country singing career with an original song “If I Could Fly to You.”
When Kyrie is kidnapped, it’s all Tom can do to make sure he protects her while not eating anyone.

THANK YOU MUCHLY, BUT WE ALREADY KNEW:  A data maven says fraud affected the election outcome.

1) We remember the impossible numbers in the middle of the night (those of us who were awake.)

2) Even if we didn’t, the courts’ refusal to let anyone present a case often on bizarre, spurious “standing” grounds, would be a red flag.

3) The democrats trying to shut up anyone who even mentions fraud is as good as an admission of guilt. What the innocent do, like say the Republicans after 2016, is make sure the opposition gets all possible opportunities to show what they think is evidence.

4) The military-occupied capital is totally what people who didn’t steal the election would do.

OH, DEAR LORD:  Leftist Pushing For Biden To Appoint ‘Reality Czar’.

a) stop with the Czars already.  b) leftists couldn’t find reality with two hands and a seeing eye dog. That’s why they think they can remake reality with words.