Joe Biden's America in Three Easy Lessons
It's hard to make Trump look good, but it's easy to make him look better than this.
First. Joe Biden’s West Point.
“Duty, Honor, Country.” Those words have been the anthem of West Point’s mission statement since before this century began. They call forth what military service is supposed to be about. Is there some need now to shove them behind the curtain? Apparently there is, if you’re a Biden appointee. From this news report:
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point has made the decision to remove the "Duty, Honor, Country" motto from its mission statement….
In a letter sent to students and supporters, Superintendent Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland said the phrase would be replaced in the mission statement with the words, "Army Values."
"Our responsibility to produce leaders to fight and win our nation's wars requires us to assess ourselves regularly," Gilland wrote in a letter to cadets and supporters on Monday. "Thus, over the past year and a half, working with leaders from across West Point and external stakeholders, we reviewed our vision, mission, and strategy to serve this purpose."
He continued: "As a result of this assessment, we recommended the following mission statement to our senior Army leadership: ‘To build, educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character committed to the Army Values and ready for a lifetime of service to the Army and Nation.’"
There might be someone who can make sense of this bureaucratic lingo, but I’m not the one, nor do I have much of an idea about what “Army Values” means, except that it sounds so deliberately opaque that — a suspicious person might think — it can be filled in later with some iteration of these “values” that at least has a specific meaning. An iteration like, let us imagine, “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” — that or some other Wokey catchphrase that the administration would just as soon not trot out explicitly before the election, but that it’s been quietly importing into the military for Biden’s entire term. Or maybe something about using the correct pronoun, whatever that may be, when referring to transgendered people — always an essential element of national defense. I mean, look, Biden might have sacrificed American soldiers in his panicked, helter-skelter retreat from Afghanistan; and fumbled away our ability and willingness to deter aggressive moves by Russia, China, Iran and Iran’s proxies; and our enemies might be developing hypersonic weapons while we’re lagging behind, but at least our sensitivity is improving.
Duty, Honor and Country are, meanwhile, disappearing.
Second. Joe Biden’s Justice Department appointees.
I spotted this little-noticed story from Boston 25 News a couple of days ago, titled, “Former U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins suspended from practicing law in Massachusetts.”
Former Suffolk County District Attorney and U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Rachael Rollins has been suspended from practicing law in Massachusetts….
Rollins’ license to practice law in the Bay State was suspended in February for non-payment of registration fees, documents show.
Not a big deal standing by itself — anyone can forget to send in his or her bar dues — but as is so often the case with Biden’s appointees, it doesn’t stand by itself:
Rollins resigned as U.S. Attorney last May after a federal investigation found that she attempted to derail the re-election of her successor by using her influence and resources as U.S. attorney.
In other words, political corruption and abuse of office. Here’s some of the backstory from last year.
Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins will resign following a monthslong investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general into her appearance at a political fundraiser and other potential ethics issues….
The resignation of a U.S. attorney amid ethics concerns is an exceedingly rare phenomenon and is especially notable for a Justice Department that under Attorney General Merrick Garland has sought to restore a sense of normalcy…
This is Boston, so you know they have to add the kicker: “…following the turbulent four years of the Trump administration..”
Still, they do report some of the juicy parts:
Rollins was a controversial pick to be Massachusetts’ top federal law enforcer and twice needed Vice President Kamala Harris to break a tie for her nomination to move forward in the Senate amid fierce opposition from Republicans, who painted her as a radical.
Before taking the high-profile U.S. attorney job, she was the top prosecutor for Suffolk County... In her role there, she sparred with Boston’s largest police union and pushed ambitious criminal justice changes, most notably a policy not to prosecute certain low-level crimes such as shoplifting [among many others].
She was the first woman of color to serve as a district attorney in Massachusetts and the first Black woman to become U.S. attorney for the state.
There is of course nothing wrong with being the first black or the first woman to hold the powerful office of US Attorney. But there’s plenty wrong with holding that office and that power simply because you’ll be the first black woman, and thus a sop to the Left’s favored constituencies.
I mean, who does Ms. Rollins think she is? President of Harvard?
This is hardly the first example of the administration’s using identity rather than achievement to make appointments, but it’s a particularly damning one because the power to prosecute, if given to a person of less than high character and only incidental devotion to law, is especially dangerous. A rogue prosecutor can hound the innocent and ignore the guilty (or give them the kid glove treatment), thus endangering the public and, perhaps equally bad over the long haul, bringing disrepute to the institutions we look to for civic protection (and whose proper functioning is the central barrier between ordered liberty and the vigilantism of a public that has lost faith in the effectiveness or rectitude of the authorities).
Anyway, Massachusetts will now need a different US Attorney. Is Fani Willis available (speaking of the “first woman of color,” etc.)?
Third. Joe Biden’s slow motion betrayal of our critical ally, Israel.
Politico reports:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he intends to press ahead with an invasion of the city of Rafah on the southern border of the Gaza Strip in defiance of President Biden, who has warned such an offensive would be a "red line."
Amid signs of increasing frustration with Netanyahu, Biden told MSNBC on Saturday that he opposed an escalation of the conflict into Rafah, and that he could not accept "30,000 more Palestinians dead."
This is part of Biden’s “double game” against Israel (as Paul has aptly put it), in which Biden continues to supply that nation but does so against the backdrop of increasingly angry and ominous warnings. Now admittedly we learned from Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, that warning about the infamous “red line” can mean next to nothing, but it’s important to remember that that red line was threatened against an enemy (Syria), and so was suspect ab initio, whereas this red line is being threatened against a friend, and so must be taken more seriously.
As we see once again, Biden’s position reflects not the vital interests of the United States in aiding the defeat of a particularly savage form of international terrorism, but only Biden’s vital interests in maintaining political viability with Palestinian and Palestinian-adjacent groups in key states, Michigan foremost among them, if he is to preserve any realistic hope of beating Trump — the man he’s currently trailing in the polls despite Trump’s numerous indictments.
Biden’s double game is not only breathtakingly venal but, yet worse (believe it or not) patently idiotic as a matter of successfully confronting Hamas, and thus Iran. Bret Stephens explained this in his opinion piece in the New York Times. Every word is worth the read, but the best I can do here is quote a small part of it:
The best way to get Hamas to stop fighting is to beat it. If Israel were to end the war now [without taking Rafah and] with several Hamas battalions intact, at least four things would happen.
First, it would be impossible to set up a political authority in Gaza that isn’t Hamas: If the Palestinian Authority or local Gazans tried to do so, they wouldn’t live for long. Second, Hamas would reconstitute its military force as Hezbollah did in Lebanon after the 2006 war with Israel — and Hamas has promised to repeat the attacks of Oct. 7 “a second, a third, a fourth” time. Third, the Israeli hostages would be stuck in their awful captivity indefinitely. Fourth, there would never be a Palestinian state. No Israeli government is going to agree to a Palestinian state in the West Bank if it risks resembling Gaza.
Stephens also takes on one of the frequently heard criticisms of Israel — echoed in Biden’s comments — that, since Israel’s defenders sometimes refer to the Holocaust, “it surely can’t be in Israel’s interests to be seen perpetrating a version of it in Gaza. Just look at the worldwide explosion of antisemitism since Oct. 7.”
Stephens’ devastating answer, which should be read to Biden until he can remember it, is:
That analogy is false and offensive on many levels. Israel is fighting a war it didn’t seek, against an enemy sworn to its destruction and holding scores of its citizens hostage. If Israel had wanted to wipe out Gazans as Germans sought to wipe out Jews, it could have done so on the first day of the war. Israel is fighting a tough war against an evil enemy that puts its own civilians in harm’s way. Maybe there should be more public pressure on Hamas to surrender than on Israel to save Hamas from the consequences of its actions.
As for antisemitism, the war hasn’t generated a torrent of antisemitism so much as it has exposed it.
Everywhere I look in the MSM, I see unending criticism of Donald Trump, his classlessness, his self-absorption, and his obliviousness to both law and some of the country’s most valuable norms of governance and leadership. Not a little of that criticism is true. But the country cannot make an adult judgment this November without looking at what the alternative will be. In just the three areas I’ve discussed here — three out of dozens, I fear — we get a glimpse. There’s no use in trying to gussy it up: For America’s future, what we see with Biden at the helm is ugly and terribly, terribly dangerous.
Right on all counts. I am surprised the Times is still willing to publish Stephens, the only op ed writer who isn't effectively pro Hamas. I would like to read it but won't give that propoganda rag a dime of my money. I can predict that the comments under his piece will be something to behold.
Great article. Just when you think DEI/CRT/Wokeness can be pushed back, you once again realize that it is fully infected every institution in America. The military academies are no different than your run of the mill liberal arts college brainwashing the next generation to hate their country.