With Joe Biden sinking into senility, who’s running the country?

Well, of course they had to say it, even though it’s a lie, and everyone knows it’s a lie.

The Democrats used a picture of a smiling, robust-looking Joe Biden in their tweet proclaiming President Biden the winner of the debate, but their problem is that he was exposed as not robust, but a faltering and confused elderly man who is visibly sinking into dementia. Even The New York Times couldn’t hide the truth:

A Fumbling Performance, and a Panicking Party

President Biden’s shaky, halting debate performance has Democrats talking about replacing him on the ticket.

by Peter Baker | Thursday, June 27, 2024 | Updated: Friday, June 28, 2024 | 2:35 AM EDT

President Biden hoped to build fresh momentum for his re-election bid by agreeing to debate nearly two months before he is to be formally nominated. Instead, his halting and disjointed performance on Thursday night prompted a wave of panic among Democrats and reopened discussion of whether he should be the nominee at all. Continue reading

I love it when a plan falls apart! Aiding the civilian population in Gaza simply prolongs the war, meaning more civilian deaths in the long run.

President Joe Biden started out with a policy of strong support for Israel following the October 7th terrorist attacks by the murderers, kidnappers, and rapists infesting Hamas. But, like so many of the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading on the left and in the Democratic Party, he started going all wobbly in his aged knees when he saw what war is actually like once the Israel Defense Force counterattacked. Modern communications, ubiquitous smart phone cameras — how can the ‘Palestinians’ be smart enough to use smart phones, but still stupid enough to attack Israel? — an social media exposed to the war what war is like, the kind of images which we would have seen in Germany and Japan and Italy after the tides of World War II had turned, if such had existed in 1944-45. The exact numbers will never be known, but guesstimates are that between 300,000 and 600,000 German civilians, and over 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by Allied bombing raids. Many more were injured, and industrial workers losing their homes were either unable to continue in war production, or less productive when they did work. This was all part of the war effort.

Mr Biden, of course, decided that the United States must Do Something to ease the plight of the poor, poor civilians in Gaza. From The Wall Street Journal:

How Ambitious Plans for a Floating Aid Pier off Gaza Fell Apart

Biden promised it would deliver ‘massive amounts’ of aid, but weather and logistics have hampered plans

Continue reading

References

References
1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

In the end, there will be no peace without victory

Sgt Benjamin Netanyahu

So, who should determine Gaza’s future: a doddering old man who, despite being of military age while the United States was fighting in Vietnam, never wore his country’s uniform, or a combat veteran of several actions against the Arabs, serving in the Sayeret Matkal, one of Israel’s top special forces units? Who better knows Israel’s Arab enemies, a man who knows only what he’s been told by a legion of Ivy League graduates, or one who has fought them, face-to-face, and has had to deal with the Arabs for all of his adult life? From The Wall Street Journal:

In Dueling Remarks, Biden and Netanyahu Spar Over Gaza’s Future

Israel’s prime minister says he won’t allow the Palestinian Authority to take over Gaza

By David S. Cloud, Carrie Keller-Lynn, Summer Said, and Andrew Restuccia | Updated, Tuesday, December 12, 2023 | 4:09 PM EST

President Biden and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clashed Tuesday over who should govern Gaza after the war, in a remarkable public display of differences emerging between the two leaders over the conflict.

Speaking during a fundraiser in Washington, Biden made his toughest remarks since the war began about Netanyahu’s government. He suggested that its hard-line stance has prevented Netanyahu from accepting the Biden administration’s postwar plan to have the Palestinian Authority take over Gaza, and that it would also obstruct progress toward political, economic and security arrangements that could spawn a separate Palestinian state—an outcome the U.S. president sees as a long-term solution to the conflict.

If you do not subscribe to the Journal, you can read the article here. Continue reading

The Dummkopf from Delaware strikes again! Nothing quite like insulting a leader when you are trying to negotiate with him

We have previously noted how Joe Biden has managed to insult Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, and how that hasn’t produced the foreign policy results the President wanted.

So now, with the United States military weakened by having send war materiel to Ukraine, and abandoned more in Afghanistan, Mr Biden has sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China for negotiations with Xi Jinping, and one would think that it might not be a great time to insult the Chinese President, right? Well, if one did think that, one would be wrong!

China says Biden comments likening leader Xi to a dictator ‘extremely absurd and irresponsible’

Associated Press | Wednesday, June 21, 2023

China on Wednesday called comments by President Joe Biden referring to Chinese leader Xi Jinping as a dictator “extremely absurd and irresponsible.”

The new clash of words comes just over a day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken concluded a visit to Beijing that sought to break the ice in a relationship that has hit a historical low.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Biden’s comments at a fundraiser in California “go totally against facts and seriously violate diplomatic protocol, and severely infringe on China’s political dignity.”

“It is a blatant political provocation. China expresses strong dissatisfaction and opposition,” Mao said at a daily briefing.

“The U.S. remarks are extremely absurd and irresponsible,” Mao said.

Blinken’s visit, during which he met with Xi, was aimed at easing tensions between the two superpowers but appeared not to have achieved any solid results.

The policy of the United States has long been that Taiwan is a part of China, but supports the separate government. However, Xi Jinping has long been annoyed at Taiwan’s separate government, and now that he has secured his position at home as President for life, and pretty much rooted out any real opponents, he has the opportunity to invade and conquer Taiwan.

Taiwan is only a couple hundred miles from the Chinese coastline, but over 6,000 miles from the continental United States. We are committed to defending Taiwan, but that begs the question: how can we defend Taiwan if China invades?

Add to that all of the war materiel we have sent to Ukraine, as well as just left behind in Afghanistan, and we are simply unprepared to do what it would take to defend Taiwan. China could invade and occupy before we could get any substantial forces there. At that point, the problem is no longer the defense of Taiwan, but the liberation of Taiwan.

The last time the United States and Chinese military were in direct conflict didn’t produce an American victory, but a bloody stalemate around the 38th parallel in Korea, and in that instance, American forces were already strongly in place in Korea before China sent its ‘volunteers’ across the Yalu River. The only good result of the Korean War was that my parents met in Tokyo!

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has over two million trained men and women on active duty. Ground troops make up the bulk of the army with 965,000 soldiers, while the navy has 260,000 members and the air force 395,000. There is also a strategic missile force of 120,000 and a paramilitary arm with 500,000 soldiers.

Our worldwide defense commitments were made when we were by far the world’s strongest nuclear power, but now both the Soviet Union Russia and China have nuclear forces capable of completely obliterating our country, and we have no way to stop them other than our own deterrent forces.

Biden, at the fundraiser on Tuesday night local time, said that Xi was embarrassed over the recent tensions surrounding a suspected Chinese spy balloon that had been shot down by the Air Force over the East Coast.

“That’s a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn’t know what happened,” Biden said.

LOL! It was a great embarrassment for the United States that we allowed the thing to cross the entire US before shooting it down. If anything, it showed President Xi that Mr Biden lacked decisiveness and resolve.

Will China invade Taiwan? We know neither if nor when such would happen, and, supposedly, China is building up its military even more before such action would be seriously contemplated, but it could also happen tomorrow. China has certainly been pushing the envelope with what appear to be deliberate provocations, but insulting the Chinese leader when you have your top diplomat in Beijing, trying to reach a less tense accommodation is pretty much what I’d expect from the dummkopf from Delaware.

America’s disastrous Middle Eastern policies under Joe Biden.

Remember when the Democrats were telling us that the election of Joe Biden would usher in a new-found respect for the United States around the world? Remember when we were told by the credentialed media assured us that the end of Donald Trump’s wicked regime and ‘America First’ policies would bring foreign relations back to normalcy?

Yet, as we have previously reported, things have not quite gone as well as we might like. Now, from The Wall Street Journal:

Saudi Officials, Hamas Leaders Set to Meet in Jeddah to Discuss Re-Establishing Ties

A reset would mark a setback for U.S. and Israeli efforts to counter Iranian influence in the Middle East

By Summer Said, Dov Lieber, and Aaron Boxerman | Updated Sundy, April 16, 2023 | 12:55 PM EDT

Senior Saudi officials were planning to meet with leaders of the Palestinian militant and political group Hamas on Sunday to discuss renewing diplomatic ties which have been cool since 2007, part of a diplomacy spree led by Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman that has seen Riyadh move closer to Iran.

In other words, diplomacy at least partly aided by the younger President Bush helped to push the terrorist organization Hamas away from Saudi Arabia, while American diplomacy under President Biden has undone that, and a lot more. Mr Biden took a politically risky trip to visit the Crown Prince in October of 2022, and through either planning or simple ineptitude, managed to insult the Prime Minister in private, and later call him a liar, in public. As the de facto authoritarian ruler of Saudi Arabia, perhaps that wasn’t the wisest idea. A brief description from Wikipedia:

Mohammed rules an authoritarian government. There are no democratic institutions in Saudi Arabia, and elements of repression are evident. Islamic scholars, human rights activists, women’s rights activists, journalists, former insiders, Islamists, and other political dissidents are systematically repressed through tactics including torture and jailing, and some reports have alleged that Mohammed uses a group known as the Tiger Squad to carry out extrajudicial killings. He was personally linked to the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian Washington Post columnist who had criticised the Saudi government, but he has denied involvement in the killing. Mohammed was the architect of Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen which has exacerbated the humanitarian crisis and famine there. His government was also involved in the escalation of the Qatar diplomatic crisis, the 2017 detention of Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri, a 2018 diplomatic spat with Canada, the arrest of Saudi princes and billionaires in 2017, the 2018–2019 Saudi crackdown on feminists, an alleged phone hack against Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos in 2019, and treason charges against his cousin and rival Muhammad bin Nayef in 2020. Saudi Arabia’s relations with the Biden administration have been strained, especially after Mohammed’s refusal to increase oil production in the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman on arriving at Al Yamamah Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on December 8. Photo: Saudi Press Agency via AP

Prince Mohammed was hardly well disposed to the United States, and the ideas of Western classical liberalism even prior to being insulted by President Biden, despite a couple of ‘liberalizing’ changes regarding the religious police and restrictions on women. But now the Crown Prince is moving in a direction which directly endangers the fragile not-exactly-peace-but-not-outright-war in the Middle East.

Re-establishing ties between Iran-backed Hamas, which is a U.S. designated terrorist group, and the Saudi kingdom would mark a setback for efforts by the U.S. and Israel to establish a military alliance between Israel and other Sunni-majority countries against Iran and its allies. They also complicate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal of normalizing relations with Riyadh, with opposition to Iran as their primary shared interest.

Hamas exists, of course, solely to destroy Israel. While Hamas are also the de facto government in the Gaza Strip area of the Palestinians, an area that Israel completely evacuated under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, their policies have been nothing but resistance and war. When Israel pulled out, in 2005, the Palestinians were given control of the area and the ability to make it into whatever they could. With fabulous beaches, the Palestinians could have turned the area into a warm-water beach resort which would have drawn Europeans, and euros, by the hundreds of thousands.

Instead, they turned it into just another Palestinian base from which to attack Israel, and Israel retains some external control over the 141 mi² territory.

Hamas was invited to the kingdom by Saudi leaders, Hamas officials said. Senior officials are expected to land in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, late Sunday, the officials said. The effort to re-establish ties is being pushed by Iran and Syria, said Saudi officials.

As part of the talks, Hamas officials hope to free scores of Palestinian prisoners held in Saudi Arabia who were imprisoned when the two sides were at odds, according to Saudi officials and a diplomat familiar with the matter.

“We seek relations with all forces in the region and the world, and we have no enmity toward anyone, except for the Zionist enemy,” tweeted Mousa Abu Marzouk, a Hamas official who will be attending the meeting on Sunday.

Jewish voters in the United States normally give around three-quarters of their votes to Democrats; this is what they’ve achieved with that.

Israel is the only real democracy in the entire area, the only one with a Western civilization culture, one which, though officially Jewish, tolerates Islam and Christianity. Yet we have previously had fairly strong and respectful relations with Saudi Arabia . . . and President Biden has managed to help torpedo that. American policy has been, for decades, the isolation of Iran, but with the Iranian nuclear deal under President Obama, and Mr Biden’s current diplomacy, American Democrats have managed to not just weaken that isolation, but help Iran to gain allies. More, in our attempts to fight Russia in Ukraine, it has pushed Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China into closer ties with Russia.

With Joe Biden as President, you can count on it: things will only get worse.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

Joe Biden has earned exactly what he’s getting from Saudi Arabia Are there no adults in the White House?

We have previously noted that the oil production cut by OPEC+ was primarily engineered by Russia and Saudi Arabia, and that President Biden’s statements condemning Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler, might not have exactly persuaded that nation to work charitably with the United States. Now, from Business Insider:

The US and Saudi Arabia traded petty insults in an feud over oil after a reported secret deal fell apart

by Tom Porter | Thursday, October 27, 2022 | 7:00 AM EDT

A US official mocked a comment by a Saudi prince who claimed the White House was acting immaturely, the latest exchange in an embarrassing feud between the nations over oil.

“It’s not like some high school romance here,” John Kirby, the communications coordinator at the National Security Council, said when asked about a comment by Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman.

The prince had criticized the White House for releasing some of its vast oil reserves to reduce prices, painting the move as childish and describing Saudi Arabia as the “maturer” country.

Kirby was not happy. “We’re talking about a significant, important bilateral relationship, a partnership that has survived over 80 years,” he said. “I don’t think talking about it in terms like that necessarily lends the gravity of how important this relationship is, to the way that we’re considering it.”

The New York Times reported on it from a different angle:

U.S. Officials Had a Secret Oil Deal With the Saudis. Or So They Thought.

After Saudi leaders pushed to slash oil production despite a visit by President Biden, American officials have been left fuming that they were duped.

By Mark Mazzetti, Edward Wong and Adam Entous | Tuesday, October 25, 2022

WASHINGTON — As President Biden was planning a politically risky trip to Saudi Arabia this summer, his top aides thought they had struck a secret deal to boost oil production through the end of the year — an arrangement that could have helped justify breaking a campaign pledge to shun the kingdom and its crown prince.

It didn’t work out that way.

Mr. Biden went through with the trip. But earlier this month, Saudi Arabia and Russia steered a group of oil-producing countries in voting to slash oil production by two million barrels per day, the opposite of the outcome the administration thought it had secured as the Democratic Party struggles to deal with inflation and high gas prices heading into the November elections.

So, President Biden went through with what the Times called a “politically risky trip”, but while on that trip, raised the Jamal Khashoggi killing at the very beginning:

“I raised it at the top of the meeting, making clear what I thought at the time and what I think of it now,” Mr. Biden said. “I was straightforward and direct in discussing it. I made my view crystal clear. I said very straightforwardly for an American president to be silent on an issue of human rights is inconsistent with who we are and who I am. I always stand up for our values.”

He reported that Prince Mohammed, often known by his initials M.B.S., denied culpability.

“He basically said that he was not personally responsible for it,” Mr. Biden said. “I indicated that I thought he was.”

Somehow, some way. no one in the Biden Administration was adult enough to realize that the President’s supposedly private conversations with the Crown Prince, which Mr Biden then reiterated publicly, might just sabotage the deal that had been previously negotiated to help “justify breaking a campaign pledge to shun the kingdom and its crown prince.”

The move led angry Biden administration officials to reassess America’s relationship with the kingdom and produced a flurry of accusatory statements between the two governments — including a charge by the White House that Saudi Arabia was helping Russia in its war in Ukraine.

Lawmakers who had been told about the trip’s benefits in classified briefings and other conversations that included details of the oil deal — which has not been previously disclosed and was supposed to lead to a surge in production between September and December — have been left fuming that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman duped the administration.

An obvious point: the Arabs have a completely different culture than do Americans — yes, I know: we Americans do not really seem to have just one culture ourselves — and perhaps it shouldn’t have been expected that the Crown Prince would shrug off a little public insult the way Americans seem to believe he should have. Mr Khasoggi’s murder was arranged sometime after the Saudi exile, who wrote for The Washington Post, essentially called Mr bin Salman a liar. It was a political risk for the Crown Prince to arrange, order, or at least suggest — “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” — that Mr Khasoggi needed to be eliminated, but it happened anyway. A savvy foreign policy expert might have realized that Mr bin Salman took things, took criticism, personally.

Of course, when I look at the silliness, right before an election in which the Democrats are expected to lose control of the House of Representatives, in which the Biden Administration has engaged, I don’t see a lot of savviness evident.

Perhaps those congressmen “fuming that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman duped the administration” might start asking themselves: was it Mr bin Salman who duped the Biden Administration, or was that Mr Biden himself?
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Cross-posted on American Free News Network.

Scratch a liberal, find a fascist

It seems that President Biden believes he has the authority to order people to get the COVID-19 vaccines:

    Biden expresses frustration over the unvaccinated, says ‘a distinct minority’ is keeping the U.S. from overcoming the coronavirus

    By Annie Linskey, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Seung Min Kim and Lisa Rein | Thursday, September 9, 2021 | 5:52 PM EDT

    President Biden announced sweeping new vaccine mandates Thursday that will affect tens of millions of Americans, ordering all businesses with more than 100 employees to require their workers to be inoculated or face weekly testing.

    Biden also said he was requiring all health facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding to vaccinate their workforces, which the White House believes will impact 50,000 locations.

    And the president announced he would sign an executive order that would require all federal employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus — without an option for those who prefer to be regularly tested instead — in an effort to create a model he hopes state governments and private companies will adopt.

    The cluster of new policies comes as the country grapples with the highly contagious delta variant, which has sent cases surging to more than 150,000 a day and is causing more than 1,500 daily deaths. The White House has struggled to convince hesitant Americans to get vaccinated and has been increasingly shifting toward requirements.

    In remarks from the White House, Biden took a more antagonistic tone toward the unvaccinated than he has in the past, as he turned from cajoling toward compulsion and blamed those who refuse to get shots for hurting those around them.

Yeah, that’s going to persuade people who haven’t wanted to get vaccinated to do so!

There’s more at the original, but the Washington Post article never stated under what legal authority the President claims he can order private businesses to do this. The New York Times said that:

    The requirements will be imposed by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is drafting an emergency temporary standard to carry out the mandate, according to the White House.

An obvious question: if getting vaccinated is so important, why did Mr Biden only order it for companies with 100 or more employees?

There’s at least one more day of the special session of the Kentucky General Assembly; I would suspect that the legislators would quickly put together a bill banning all state employees from in any way assisting OSHA in enforcing this order of the President’s/

Final Jeopardy

Mayim Bialik: “Today’s Final Jeopardy category is ‘Foreign Affairs,’ and the answer is, ‘Yes.’ You have thirty seconds to write down your response, and be sure to put it in the form of a question.”

Jeopardy jingle music plays.

Mayim Bialik: “And now we come to our defending champion, Elwood. What did he have?”

Screen reveals, “Is Joe Biden stupid or senile?”

Mayim Bialik: “That’s correct!”

In noting the Biden Administration’s plans to reopen the American consulate in Jerusalem, where we already have our embassy to Israel, William Teach wrote:

This has the chance of causing big problems, and simply shows that Democrats hate Israel and Jews, and love the terrorists who attack Israel civilians.

Actually, what it shows is that liberalism is just plain stupid. There is a natural tendency to favor the plucky underdog, but that tendency is something which has to be tempered with a realistic assessment of just who the underdog is. Who could have imagined that the homosexual, transgender supporting American left would want to see an ‘LGBTQIA+’ supporting Israeli government defeated by an Islamic, if not completely Islamist, movement which disparages, beats, injures, and sometimes just outright kills homosexuals and ‘transgenders,’ but that’s what we have today. Who could have imagined that an American Democratic Party, the second most loyal voting demographic of which are Jews, would favor a group the stated intention of which is to conquer the Jews and push them into the sea?

We’ve just seen the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, and our State Department has expressed dismay that there are no women in the Taliban 2.0 government, when the original banned women from leaving the house without a responsible male escort, and barred girls from being educated.

American liberalism has a collective pair of thick, foggy, rose colored glasses, glasses through which the left see the world not as it is, but the way that they believe it should be. The Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, al Fatah, these groups all tell us what they want to do, but today’s left just blithely ignore it, seeming to think that if we are just nice to them, they’ll behave like good, Western liberals.

Joe Biden is both senile and stupid. The rest of the left? Perhaps not senile, but certainly stupid.

Comment rescue: We told you so!

Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

Remember: 81 million people allegedly voted for this senile fool. If you don’t want to blame Biden, blame the idiots who elected him.

On Patterico’s Pontifications, I commented:

    neither Trump nor his supporters ever proposed “the result” that you supporters of Biden have handed all of us.

    Being a critic of Trump and his fanatical devotees doesn’t mean being a supporter of Biden, or an apologist for his Afghanistan policy.

    Actually, it means that you own it!

    Our esteemed host wrote, maybe more than a year ago — it was the concluding line of a main post, which, alas!, I didn’t save — that he’d vote for Joe Biden and accept the [insert slang term for feces here] show that would follow, because he thought President Trump was a crook. That, at least, was admitting that he owned the results.

    I told everyone here that perhaps President Trump wasn’t a nice guy, but it was his policies, not his personality, which mattered. So many people here voted for Mr Biden’s personality, ’cause he wasn’t an [insert slang term for the rectum here] like President Trump, but along with the nice guy with the two German Shepherds and the wife with a doctorate, you got an imbecile who wants to not only keep abortion legal, but force taxpayers to pay for them, who can’t tell the difference between males and females, who is pushing through a $3.5 trillion (faux) infrastructure plan, who wants to make vote fraud easier rather than more difficult, is locking up the Capitol kerfufflers without bail, so that they can be punished before they ever go to trial, who is caving in to the idiotic Black Lives Matter philosophy, who has reopened our borders to waves of illegal immigrants, and 8,724,366.7 other idiotic things.

    If you voted for Joe Biden, you voted for all of those things, along with an even worse person to be just a heartbeat away from a Presidency currently held by a 78 year, 8 month, and 27 day old guy in questionable mental health.

The Never Trumpers need to be reminded of just what they sought, of just for whom the voted.